Religious fervour is a wonderful thing, in the right place (I think?). But to my waty of thinking it has no real p0lace in programming. Or does it? Ever since the beginning of my own career over thirty years ago I have seen this over and over and over again. 'C' vs Assembler, TimeSHare Basic vs Fortran, Algol vs APL, modular code vs object orientation, you name it, we have fought battles long and loquacious over it.

Any language is as useful as you make it. Perl has advatages, but then so does 'C' in some places, maybe VB has in others (althought I can;t think of any right now!) Well I remember a major software product of my own, in the 1980's my colleagues and I raged a heated battle over whether we should re-write in 'C' or Pascal. We tried both. About the same amount of code, about the same number of major headaches, roughly the same volume of swearing, cursing and abuse from the programming teams.

Eventually I sold the product, it was in Borland C++ at the time and has been maintained and enhanced in that environment ever since. But now it is getting old, the original foundation for the C++ version was actually written in Borland Turbo-C/C++ 4.5! So the developers are saying they want to move it to something else. But what? Well thats why I got a call a few weeks ago. I have been contributing algorithms and mathematics to the developers ever since I sold it, they asked what I was ciurrently using to prove algorithms and validate my models. There was stunned silence when I said, "Perl and PDL".

So I expect that the developers will get their way and rewrite the whole thing in Java. The estimated budget is $7 million US dollars. Well good luck guys, the product used to sell for $5,000 6 years ago. It now sells for $285,000. The president of the company told me he has no idea what it will sell for in the new version, but he did suggest that they would, quite naturally "supply the equipment it was to run on as part of the price". So hey, they dont need platform independence, they just need a platform to run on. When I asked why they wanted to use Java he said "well, I can afford to lose the Director of Product Development, and he wants to do it in Java."

About as good a reason as any I have heard for choosing a language!

jdtoronto