I don't see any problem with ActiveState and Microsoft cooperating closely - Perl is not Java. Perl does not have the (ridiculous) claim of "Write once run anywhere", Perl is the swiss army chainsaw. And if I can use Perl comfortably under Windows, why should I not want to ? Writing portable Perl is already possible and already needs lots of consideration and forethinking, as there are many modules that are either not available or not with the standard distribution on the different platforms - on the other side, there already are some cross-platform modules (like the path-conversion module whose name I forgot), but if I want to administer/do Win32 specific stuff, why should I not use Perl ? Should I use something else, because there is some "pureness" in Perl I have not yet seen ?

There is nothing in Perl that Microsoft could extend or embrace that could not go to other platforms or be useful under Win32 only. For those Microsoft-haters, the whole thing has the drawback of making Win32 a more viable platform for administration, but hey, such is life ;).

On a completely unrelated note, this will finally get my cross-platform Perl worm off the ground (Abigail is rumored to have written such a worm) - the possibilities ;) - Just imagine - I_Love_You.pl (pronounced "I love you Perl")

Are you all MAD?!?!

We don't want the Borg anywhere near perl! I hope Mr. Wall steps in and stops this. Look what M$ did to C and C++! They corrupted it with the MFC! M$ is the scourge of the IT industry. Bill Gates is an admitted anti-open source freak!

When will people learn that the Borg do not help, they assimilate!

I like my 'vi' editor. That is all the IDE I need. This scares me! When was the last time M$ did anything good for the industry?!?

J. J. Horner

Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix

jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org

"Be a heretic" - at least that's what the cookie in the upper left corner says ;)

Having clicked the "reply" button, I have to step forward and bite your flamebait - I don't see where Microsoft did horrible things to C and C++ - the MFC is just a library (at least in my eyes - I don't program C or C++ for that matter) - it has extensive interfaces for Windows and some container classes etc. - I would applaud Microsoft for bringing some other means of (Win32) user interface programming to Perl (although I don't see much use for it, honestly). And let's be honest, there weren't much horrible things left to do to C and C++ anyway.

If you are talking about implementations of C and C++, I don't see bad things there either - Microsoft is in the best company of Borland, Zortech and GNU C(++) for the various and differing implementations of C and C++ - and Perl is a settled "industry standard" already - maybe things would be getting interesting if Microsoft put Larry Wall on their paycheck to make some proprietary extensions to Perl, and Larry then refused to back-port these extensions ...

I think you see this issue too narrow - the Spirit of Perl cannot be corrupted by Microsoft

When was the last time M$ did anything good for the industry?!?

They created the low-price PC market. Or would you prefer your PC to cost $10k?

- Ozymandias

I'm sorry but I can't let that slide! this is so much crap! Microsoft didn't invent personal computers or make them cheap. Lots of other people were in the personal computer market before IBM got involved and lots of them had better hardware designs too. It was pure luck on Microsofts part and incompetence on IBM's that gave Microsoft such a dominant position.

If anybody made IBM compatible machines cheap, it was the clone makers who comoditised the market. The BIOS cloners were at least as important as Microsoft in that respect (if not more so).

And yes this is an Anti-Microsoft rant, but I struggle with thier software every working day. I just wish my Senior management (read pointy haired managers) were enlightened enough to allow me to use a Unix derivitive on this machine.

Nuance

Baldrick, you wouldn't see a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord, singing "Subtle plans are here again!"

Well said. I also applaud Microsoft for doing that - way back when. You have to admit - many of us might not have desktops now if MS didn't forge the market with MS-DOS. Is that good or bad? IMO - it is both. 1: Yeah, there are the better among the whole - as always. 2: It's getting "too easy" ... I encounter fools on a daily basis. It gets worse by the minute. ( comment on 2: No, I'm not "throwing around my weight" - I'm stating things as I see them. People don't take the time to learn anymore. It's sad. ) I see it all the time - they get these "ready out of the box" systems - that cater to their every need. And, they expect the world to cater ... ah, I had best 'exit;' this while it's short! ( laughs )

doesn't M$ own a minority stake in ActiveState? (not that this gives them collective-mind status yet)

This is not entirely true.
Bill Gates, while not the nicest kid on the block, is actually owns shares in
Red Hat. Say what you will about his intentions, I don't think that even as a
business man, he would purchase stock in a company if his only intention would
be to crush it. He is a business man, and he wants to make as much money as
possible, that is why he follows the business practices that he does.
The end does not justify the means, I just wished to correct you on your statement
that Bill Gates is anti-open source. He probably thinks it's a good idea, or he
would not invest in it.

I've got an mp3 for you. I'll send a link, once I find it.

UPDATE: here it is.

J. J. Horner

Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix

jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org

Pico is my preference but you will probably seen MsCPAN that is 100% not compatable with what everyone else is doing. Then they will charge you $500 + for the Visual Studio suite.

There is a lengthy and fairly nuanced response to the activestate/MS collaboration in a couple of the thePerlJournals (http://www.tpj.com). One is response to a rabid (if clever) letter from a MS-hater, the other is a reply from the boss at activestate as to what exactly the MS $$$$s will be doing for AS and what they will be expected to do in return. Never underestimate BG's ability to accept and subvert but perl may be the mouthful they can't swallow. Oh, and there is (though I've not used it) an amazing description of a visual (perltk) debugger, ptkdb: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/A/AE/AEPAGE/ If half of what the article: http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0008.html (but you probably need to get a login/passwd from tpj first) is true, it'd be a dream come true. 'course I'm more of the vi/httpd error_log sort of debugger, myself. a

There is a lengthy and fairly nuanced response to the activestate/MS collaboration in a couple of the thePerlJournals (http://www.tpj.com). One is response to a rabid (if clever) letter from a MS-hater, the other is a reply from the boss at activestate as to what exactly the MS $$$$s will be doing for AS and what they will be expected to do in return. Never underestimate BG's ability to accept and subvert but perl may be the mouthful they can't swallow. Oh, and there is (though I've not used it) an amazing description of a visual (perltk) debugger, ptkdb: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/A/AE/AEPAGE/ If half of what the article: http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0008.html (but you probably need to get a login/passwd from tpj first) is true, it'd be a dream come true. 'course I'm more of the vi/httpd error_log sort of debugger, myself. a

> causes Windows to Crash even more and Microsoft get the blame

I'm sorry, but the phrase above makes it sound as if Microsoft had no part whatsoever in creating BSODs... I'm an NT Workstation user, and while I'll admit that it is 100 times more stable than 95/98, I can't help but think that this is because I'm typing on a VMS with a new shell. Even with this relative stability I just mentioned, there is no one but Microsoft to blame when Excel or Access crash on me. There's no excuse (except for hardware failure) for a program to crash, IMHO.

I have seen some good products come out of Microsoft. I think IIS is anoying as hell, and I personaly wouldn't use it, but I can't help admitting that I think its a good webserver. The same applies to the Proxy suite. Sure version 1 was sucky, but they made ammends with version 2.0. That's a pretty good product. All they really need is to get their act together with the OSs and applications.

You wanna know what MS products I love? Keyboards and Mice! That Intellimouse with the wheel kicks ass when changing weapons in Q3A. :o)

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

And including Windows-specific modules in a distribution is hardly evil. After all, the Perl core has several Unix-specific functions.

I've tried it, and there were a couple of things that kept me from using it on production:
• no block editting mode
• no support for multiple files
until they get those two in there I'm not too inclined in switching from a great editor (UltraEdit is my poison) to a so-so (acutally pretty good) IDE.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

Komodo SOUNDS nice, but they only announced it a couple of months ago, so who knows how long it will be before an actual IDE comes out of it? At least it will be open-source! I too love UltraEdit when I'm using Windows and I personally like CoolEdit when I'm editing on Linux, BUT the lack of a decent IDE, IMHO is one of the biggest drawbacks that Perl programmers face vs. the VStudio/Websphere/VisualAge/ColdFusion crowd. And who says that we have to use the proprietary crap that MS will put in there? If there's an option to use their ActiveState/MS' IDE for only development, code versioning and debugging, then why not? Sure, I'd FAR RATHER use an OSS IDE with CVS tie-ins, but I sure don't see one out there yet...

I don't trust them. They don't work for the common good, and that is what the open source community is all about. I don't want Perl and WinPerl. I hope my fears are unfounded.