[Israel.pm] Shortage (or Perceived Shortage) of P-Languages Programmers in Israel (and Elsewhere)

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Mr. Freedman!

I replied from my vipe.technion.ac.il account but the message did not get sent 
and now vipe.t.a.i is disconnected. So I'm replying again.

On Monday 26 June 2006 11:55, Mike Freedman wrote:
> Good question - why .NET and not Perl. Simple really....
>
> I had been using Perl as part of my previous jobs. Networking mainly...I am
> very good at networking, making things stick together with Perl. As an
> example, I created an entire backup system using Perl with a simple command
> line interface. It was very "simple", but the backbone was detailed.
> Because I used it as part of a job and it wasn't the job itself, I found it
> very hard to get a full time Perl programmers position, considering that
> most positions wanted a number years of experience. Plus I had never used
> Mod_Perl or OO in Perl in commercial (even though I had played with it in
> my own time). I know I am good - but no-body was willing to give me a try.

Heh, yes. A chicken and egg problem. One way to escape it is to contribute to 
an open-source mod_perl project. There are many of them around.

> In the mean time, someone introduced me to C# - and given I knew all about
> OOP, I gelled with it well and found a company that was willing to take me
> on as a full time programmer. A year and a bit later I am still here.
>

OK.

> How does it compare? Perl is much more flexable. You don't have to declare
> variable types, you don't have to program in OO - there are 1001 different
> ways to do the same thing and above all else its free and community based
> (as this forum prooves). 

Yes.

> After using C#, ADO.NET and .NET framework for a 
> year now - I find it very powerful with doing very little. You can produce
> window based apps in no time at all. Also - the fact that the language is
> tied in to the dev environment (where all you need for Perl is textpad and
> some imagination), makes life in respect of debugging code, implimentation
> much more powerful and simpler.
>

OK.

> OH - and for a laugh, there is the concept of regex in C#, but for the
> syntax, it tells you to look at Perl docs ;)
>

Heh. Like I said in my non-received message, Microsoft could have easily hired 
someone to write some docs for them under a good licence. Or perhaps they 
could have re-used the perl docs in some form.

It's good that .NET 1.1 already includes regexps. Java did not include them 
until Java 1.4. I recall that there was a non-free regex library for JDK 
1.0.2 already that aimed to be compatible with Perl. It wasn't open-source. 
And the Apache project also developed a Java regular expressions library. But 
Sun included the regex functionality only a long time later.

I also don't know how many Java programmers are already aware of Regexes and 
use them in their programs. The Java standard library is very large.

> The thing I have learned is that anyone can learn a language and produce a
> simple app - not everyone is a good programmer though! To learn how to
> program and produce commerical products takes a skill. I must have it - I
> am here still a year later!!

OK.

>
> Given 1/2 a chance though I would be in Israel with Komodo having a good
> time.
>

Heh, OK. Other good Perl development environments are vim/gvim (especially 
with the Perl support script and other vim plugins that people like) and 
GnuEmacs/XEmacs. Of course, Mikhael Goikhman here is a diehard joe user. 

Sagiv Barhoom and I prepared a presentation about Vim which Sagiv gave to the 
Tel Aviv Linux Club:

http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Vim/beginners/

We'd also like to give it to the Perl mongers, but people suggested us that we 
should make sure Mikhael wouldn't be there. A presentation about Emacs may 
also be instructive because some of the mongers are also using it.

See: http://perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2004-June/thread.html#5181 for a long 
thread about editors and stuff. 

While most advanced users are using vim and gvim, you can also try kwrite and 
kate (for KDE), gedit (for GNOME), kdevelop (an IDE for KDE) and 
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/ which is for Eclipse. (But is rumoured to 
still be very buggy)

At the moment I'm looking for a good PHP development environment:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.351741.7

gvim is OK for that, but from what I tried it lacks such thing as an automatic 
tag ending, and a good HTML tag/HTML attribute/PHP function auto-completion.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
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