perl

PHP and Perl crashing the enterprise party

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more

Open-source companies log impressive growth in Q2 2009

In May, I reported on the rising fortunes of Funambol, Mozilla, and other open-source companies. Signs of "green shoots" notwithstanding, the economy doesn't seem to be getting any better, but open-source companies continue to log impressive growth as open source pervades the enterprise, as Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond (@jhammond) recently noted.

Importantly, according to Hammond, while open source starts as a cost-saving exercise, it often morphs into something far more strategic:

[O]rganizations tend to start [with the goal of saving money with open source]. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become … Read more

Google App Engine sort of getting Perl support

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he's not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn't promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans' work in the area.

"I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

BBC NEWS | Egypt 'to copyright antiquities' including pyramids - Looks like people trying to sell pictures of the pyramids or sphinx will have to reckon with the Egyptian government. The Generational divide in copyright morality - The New York Times - David Pogue on the latest generation's opinion about copyright. Technology in 2008 | The Economist predicts 3 big trends for 2008 - I'm skeptical Linux on the desktop will catch on too much, and Linux already won long before the SCO Group's legal attack fell apart, and Ubuntu doesn't deserve quite that much credit. Otherwise interesting … Read more

First Perl revamp in five years released

The Perl Foundation has released Perl 5.10, the first new version in five years of a programming language with an emphasis on rough-and-ready practicality over syntactical formality.

The new version has some features designed to make programming a notch easier, according to the announcement last week. Among those features is a "say" command that eases some text-output chores, a "switch" operator to send a program in various directions depending on different situations, and improvements to the all-important "regular expression" methods for handling text. The Perl interpreter, which runs Perl programs, also is faster … Read more