[Catalyst] Page layout w/Catalyst

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Dec 15, 2005, at 11:08 AM, Brandon Black wrote:

> On 12/15/05, Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur at tortus.com> wrote:
>
>> Catalyst, because of its Perlish nature, won't ever appeal to the
>> people who want one true way of creating web applications.  At best
>> it will appeal to senior technical leads, who choose Catalyst and
>> then build their organization's one true way on top of Catalyst.
>
> I'm still mixed on whether this is a good or bad thing.  It's
> certainly what's happening at my place.  I don't know if in the very
> long term view of the health of the corporation if that's a good thing
> or a bad thing, considering things like the difficulty it might pose
> them to hire someone versed in Catalyst (or just a good perl hacker in
> general), as compared to the relative ease with which they could have
> hired a replacement team of substandard java programmers or something.

That's what I've observed: when given the choice between solutions  
that require a few highly skilled programmers and solutions that will  
work acceptably well with many barely-adequate programmers,  
organizations almost universally opt for the latter.  More often,  
organizations *have* several programmers of varying ability levels  
already, and choose frameworks and environments that work with the  
lowest common denominator.

This makes a lot of sense from a business point of view:  it's much  
easier to find barely-adequate programmers than highly skilled ones,  
and it's much cheaper to pay them, so there's less risk involved in  
choosing the framework and environment that can be used successfully  
with them.  This means that highly-skilled programmers tend to get  
bored with that sort of work, but unfortunately few businesses exist  
primarily to create interesting problems for programmers.  About the  
best you can hope for in most cases is low resistance when you try to  
automate the most boring elements.

Charlton






-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at tortus.com