Josh McAdams preaches in the press

Hooray for Josh McAdams, new PR guy for the Perl Foundation, getting some serious space in this Infoworld article "Scripting languages spark new programming era". It's your standard trend-watching high-level gloss for watchers from the sidelines, apparently programming managers who only know of Java (an important target market, to be sure).

It's unfortunate that Andi Gutmans of PHP has to wave the "I'm full of crap" banner with...

PHP has been around a long time, and some advocates of newer languages say it's past its prime. PHP adherents disagree. Perl is complex and hard to maintain, Gutmans says. "Perl has pretty much disappeared when it comes to the Web."

... although it's interesting that it's PHP, not Perl, getting accused of being "past its prime." I also can't imagine much of anything harder to maintain than PHP slapped together by thousands of non-programmers. Of course, Josh counters with:

But McAdams defended Perl's vitality, citing examples of major users. "I would ask him what Ticketmaster and Amazon use for their back ends," McAdams says. "[Perl] has a very large user base in Web apps but also has a strong presence in the financial industry."

A fine article, Josh, and I thank you for taking on this important role in TPF.