I can only imagine the fun and joy that ActiveState are having squeezing perl into the .Net world but I digress...

On the people side, my suspicion is that the common .NET runtime libraries will help bring quite a few Perl programmers into the same development groups as the current C(++) guru's.

This still doesn't remove the bigger "future skills" issue that many managers have with ‘peripheral’ languages such as Perl but it go along way into allowing perl code (albeit .Net compiled) to go deeper into the Win32 world.

Side Note: The “future skills” argument, for those who’ve yet to experience the joy runs something along the lines of the following: “Sure Bob here can do wonderful things in perl (on the side of his normal VB stuff) but what happens when he leaves? Our company is focused on VB not Perl. Why shouldn’t we keep all of our stuff in VB thus ensuring anybody in the group can maintain the code base”. I tend to regard it as a fairly good argument, having enjoyed some of the earlier choices in languages myself (Progress Version *6* anyone), although I wouldn’t suggest it was unbeatable.

On the pure technical runtime specs, I think it should do pretty well. In a pure .Net environment I suspect it’s performance won’t be that different to it’s (distant) VB cousins. As the bulk of a .Net programs time seems to be interfacing with other objects, I’m leaning on the side of “Who’ll notice?”.

As with all these type of debates, some will make comparisons to stand alone, C++ that’s been tuned to within an inch of its word length and some old assembly code that does nothing short of fry half the mother board with it’s impressive floating point calculations but…
All of this means didly for 95% of your avareage business applications.

The bulk of business code tends to revolve around making sure that things go according to the business logic plan (and not to TCP/IP rather strained melodies for example. <g>). While there certainly are components out there that do contain a plethora of complicated string and mathematical manipulation, it tends to be the exception rather than the rule with production code (IMHO).

Where was I going with all of this… I have no idea… but I feel a little more sedated now… might even put down the axe now…

Thank you for your window suckering time

PS: I'm placing my faith in mankind here that this question was something better than troll bait for those hovering over the -- button.