yes thank you for reducing an entire page of people debating the technical merits of an operating system from a software developer's perspective as a bunch of neckbeard fanboys arguing that their personal choice is the best. you certainly showed me.

Ok. You're welcome.

You sit there bashing my arguments, but the best you can come up with is that since my employer chose mod_perl as their language that says something about me as a developer? Are you one of those people that thinks perl make it impossible to write maintainable code? How many software development teams have you worked on? I've worked on many, and I've found spaghetti code in every language I've ever worked in. It's not the language, it's the programmers. If you're not capable of writing maintainable perl code, I'm sorry, but don't say nobody else can. That's a personal failing, not something to do with the language.

The main reason most of the perl code out there is the way it is is because most of it was written by sysadmins as a replacement for shell scripting (if you've seen big shell scripts, you'll have to admit that perl, even confusing, poorly written perl, is a huge step forward from bash!).

Anyway, it takes a helluva lot more than just random arguments you read on .NET BLOG to make a good software developer. There are tradeoffs, strengths, and weaknesses to every platform/framework/language/technology choice. The fact that you see everything in black & white "speaks volumes about you as a developer."

I bring up my experience and position because I want to point out that your opinions aren't shared by all developers (or even a majority of them). You talk like you have all this knowledge and experience, why don't you tell me what large software development projects you have been a part of? I would much rather have a discussion with someone who's got some idea of what they are talking about, and a 10%-finished game engine or a web site that lets your friends share their high-school beer-drinking photos doesn't count.

You want to talk about facts? A number of places I've interviewed at, been offered jobs at, and/or read perl job listings for (only in the seattle area) use perl almost exclusively. Amazon.com sells billions of dollars of merchandise and they run on mod_perl. As far as I know, all their developer "cloud" projects do as well (s3, etc.). WhitePages.com, cardomain, hell, I did a phone interview for a perl position at microsoft. Ooh, looky: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Perl's 6th. Over C#, over ruby, over python, etc.

You spray a lot of BS, and when confronted, resort to personal attacks ("oh you pick perl you must be a moron"). I feel like I'm racing in the special olympics.

Yeah, Perl's 6th, under PHP. Am I to believe that overall PHP is a stronger language to write in than Perl?

ok lets sum up what has happened... someone installs ubuntu out of boredom (sounds like something i would do :ninja:) and asks for suggestions on applications to use, a couple of suggestions are made, someone gripes about linux instead of giving helpful suggestions to the OP, more gripes, someone defends linux, flamewar... so out of 43 replies only 2 of them are relevant to the OPs question

i love the internet

I'm sorry if you got your own vitriol in your eyes, but you're talking to about four different people here. I'm sure Emon doesn't mind being accused of linking to Coding Horrors but I certainly don't want to be accused of uttering the phrase "speaks volumes about you as a developer."

But since you'd rather have a flame war, I don't see how my unpaid graphical C++ work makes me less qualified to talk about other programmers' unpaid graphical C++ work than a professional ****ter-outter of executable line noise.

...Visual Basic is #3. VB6 still has more currently-maintained lines of code written in it than any other language. People make terrible decisions because they don't know any better. Popularity is a meaningless metric and pretty much the last resort for someone who isn't prepared to or capable of arguing something on its actual merits.

Well, eventually you'll need to format. After five or more years, unless you're absolutely anal about everything you do, updates, drivers and programs will eventually starting messing windows up. Eventually, getting everything cleaned up will be way more trouble than simply formatting. I'm running on a three year old installation of XP x64, and there a windows update that can't seem to install itself. It's probably fixable, but it's likely an indication that the file system and registry are getting a bit frazzled. Other than that it's working fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of years I'll run into something that will necessitate a format.

This man has a point. I love how the following post just ignore it

Brian, shortly after I complained about the fonts on this thread I did read about that package on Google. Installed easily with package manager and there was some improvement, but I think I will play around with the anti-aliasing settings too. Thanks!

Out of curiosity, Brian, do you use Perl to generate your webpages as well? If so, did your company choose that over some other language simply because it's easier to integrate Perl that generates web pages with Perl that does whatever behind-the-scenes work gets done?

This was the point I was trying to make with my post.

Holy **** an intelligent question! The company picked perl long before I jot my job there. The code base was created over 10 years ago, maybe 12, when there were no other contenders for web languages. We ship a gui program written in C++ for sequence viewing, there was a webdav layer built a long time ago in Java, but for newer projects they just figure they have ~5 developers very familiar with perl, and it doesn't make sense for the company to look at other technologies when perl gets the job done nicely. Out of all the problems we've encountered, there's been nothing for which we can lay the blame on perl. We've run into more problems with some of our supported databases (problems with solid & oracle), other problems with our supported operating systems (mostly issues with solaris, but we've dropped that as a supported platform for our latest major version so it is slowly going to creep out of my realm of expertise [once existing customers who want to upgrade move off solaris and therefore don't generate any more support calls]), and the vast majority of real issues are with integration with 3rd party software.

Anyway, mod_perl is lighting fast, has literally thousands of high-quality, open source modules available for virtually everything under the sun, and with ~10 years of code maintenance, yes, it's possible to write perl code that's easy to maintain.

Yes, we do a lot more with it other than generate web pages. It runs our webdav server, it runs our processing pipelines (file parsing, analysis, report generation, etc.), it runs our daemon processes on both our new grids and our existing distributable software. Much of our build system is also written in perl - we basically generate ~115 RPMs nightly for each active branch (maybe 2-3 active development branches going on at any one time). In addition, all the support programs we use internally are also written in perl (scripts to configure & install the software, used by dev & the qa department, scripts for upgrading customer's systems to newer versions, database migration and schema upgrades, etc.).

No, I didn't personally write their hundreds of thousands of lines of perl code. The code base existed long before I worked at the company. But they basically task me with the difficult technical issues/problems, framework development, APIs to our system, integration with other 3rd party software, the build system, any JS that's complicated enough to give the other devs headaches, etc. Most of the stuff that requires a strong biology background is handled by the scientists (there are 3 biologists in the dev team & then myself, and one other guy who has a physics background). The GUI sequence viewer was written and maintained by a single person on our team (not me).

Jon`C, sorry to lump you in, I understand you are not the person that said that. I think there is more to being a software developer than just hacking code in your spare time. I think being part of a successful software development team (of any size > 1) over a period of time is much more important than a list of languages or operating systems someone supposedly knows. I am not questioning your ability to program by any stretch of the imagination. I do sometimes wonder where Emon is coming from, however.