Advocacy isn't just about shouting from the rooftops. The single greatest piece advocacy that Perl has is the fact that Amazon and CitySearch both run on it, after both evaluated and discarded Java as unable to meet their needs. So, if we have a lot of small businesses choosing to use Perl over some other choice, that is advocacy.
Java's greatest piece of advocacy is "Everyone else is doing it, so you won't be fired when the project fails." Sun can point to hundreds of mid-size companies that have large Java projects. Java projects have hundreds of developers on them. Hence, you have to keep up with the Joneses. That is advocacy at its finest.
Since Perl doesn't require dozens of developers on a single project, that's actually seen as a detriment to some PHB's. So, we need to be able to point to succesful ventures like Flying Car Television as startups that succeed basing their infrastructure on Perl. Otherwise, we lose the advocacy war.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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