What my experienced business manager would ask about Perl
- Can it be compared with J2EE?
- CGI? That's even older than ASP, you cannot write my webapp in it!
- Does Perl support session?
- I can let you try to code at most 20% of my webapp(you can't code the whole site with Perl, apparently), but make sure it can share session with ASP.NET.
- What's needed to run your Perl?
- Is there anything Perl can do better than Java?
- Does Perl have business value?
Like Damian said in this interview: "Selling Perl to your manager is about explaining Perl in terms that your manager cares about: stable, reliable, powerful, efficient, cheap, maintainable, well-supported, and future-proof."
Are we sharing the same situation here?
I blog about Perl.
Well, I guess that in a situation like this, the best thing you could do is actually giving an answer to each one of these concerns in a way that the business manager would understand.
I'll try to answer each one of these questions myself, as an example, but surely other people could come up more suitable answers.
* Can it be compared with J2EE?
Yes. Perl applications can run in a standard container (Plack) and in the same way you can leverage J2EE libraries, you can leverage several existing CPAN libraries which accomplish the same goal, sometimes in a better way.
* CGI? That's even older than ASP, you cannot write my webapp in it!
Then don't use CGI. Also, try to drop old-sounding names. It's a bit silly but it works. You can say the application will be written to run in an PSGI environment (and then you can make analogies to other dynamic languages).
* Does Perl support session?
Yes. This is an easy one.
* I can let you try to code at most 20% of my webapp(you can't code the whole site with Perl, apparently), but make sure it can share session with ASP.NET.
Explain that in the same way that you can't share session between a J2EE application and an ASP.NET one, you can't (easily) share session between Perl and ASP.NET. [notice that if it is easy to share session between J2EE and ASP.NET it should also be easy to do that in Perl - I'm not informed enough about this]
* What's needed to run your Perl?
Try using familiar sounding names here. No point bringing up nginx or lighttpd. When "selling" Perl, just stick to Apache. You can try to leverage known concepts such as the fact that Tomcat is related to Apache.
* Is there anything Perl can do better than Java?
Yes, good Perl teams will usually deliver results faster and with higher quality. Perl is widely known for its information processing capabilities.
* Does Perl have business value?
This is a tricky one. I would go a bit off tangent by stating that with Perl you can adhere to the same standards (such as WebService) commonly used with other languages. And that, in the end, the real business value is in the quality of your end-results as perceived by your clients.
Again, this is just a general idea. It's one of the options to handle a situation like this one. I believe that the best way to handle these cases is by making broad claims (which are deliverable). Comparing with other technologies while *subtly* making them look inferior can also work.
Generally you need to sound like you're *informing* the person who asked those questions - the moment you sound like you're advocating Perl, well, from my experience, it can only go downhill from that point.