[lug] Development & reporting tool choices

[Rob Nagler]

Jeffrey Haemer writes:
> We're all involuntary immigrants from another era; we carry it with us
> because there's an age at which change becomes synonymous with loss.

What movie is that line from? ;-)

I don't know if the change-loss dichotomy is age specific, it's just
that as I get older, recovering from loss gets harder.  Some people
are more resilient to change than others.

When I went to work at Tandem, I had to learn TACL (don't ask), CORBA
(what's that? ;-), TAL (almost like C, but not), and Guardian (it's
not Unix!).  I taught my group about Tcl, and it became the
configuration and packaging language for our group (now 724.com).
Changes happens when people overcome their fear of loss.

In 1999, I was afraid to build bivio.com in Perl, but I saw no choice.
Java wasn't ready for prime time web development.  I learned a lot as
a result of that somewhat arbitrary choice.  I almost ended up with
Tcl (ACS, if you know it), but the AOL server was less reliable than
Apache.  The most important thing I learned in the last ten years is
that LISP is the most powerful programming language ever invented, and
we are still trying to figure out how to integrate into "normal
development" all that it offers.

Rob