[SunRescue] RE: Solaris 1.1 on a 4/330

[David Cantrell]

Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>   Well, since a SPARCstation-1 can easily saturate a T1 by itself,
> it'd be fine for most people nowadays too.  But Microsoft's marketing
> (and the unfortunate proliferation of Perl) seem to have us "needing"
> much much more than that.  *sigh*

Whilst perl isn't the most efficient language in terms of CPU cycles and
memory, it is a lot more efficient than (eg) C in terms of programmer time
for most people*.  And considering that programmers are more expensive than
computers, it's fairly obvious which way organizations are going to jump**.
It really is true now that a lot of problems can be solved by just throwing
hardware at the problem.  It ain't elegant but it does the job.

For someone going it alone on their personal server, then seeing that
they're not going to get a great deal of traffic, they can write their
dynamic pages in an interpreted language and get away with it regardless
of whether they're using the latest turbo-nutter-ninja-bastard machine
or an SS2 like what I am.

* - I know all about the problems of managing development teams, and
IME it's not noticably worse for any one language compared to any other,
despite what people say about perl programmers.

** - perl isn't fast enough for all jobs of course.  That's why the
company I work for (Kokua Communications, kokuacom.com) writes some stuff
in C.  But it's very clear that even good C programmers have a lot more
problems than good perl programmers.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced