application and web app technologies

[ccc]

> If no one knows the language
> you want to use, do you have time to account for the learning curve? Do you
> really want to try and replace all your programmers?

We don't have any 'programmers' on staff. At most, we have several
people writing, maybe, two hours  of code a week, with maybe once a
year building an application. We are just your basic IT shop, system
and network administration, hardware, help desk, the web site, and
database administration. This is also the reason for the 'bad code' (
which we have in abundance.) People who are not programmers and whose
job it isn't to program will not write good code. I'm not being
perjorative, just factual.

> If you let
> programmers build their own little universes they will!

Yeah, well, if you have a database admin writing his scripts, a network
admin writing his scripts, and a couple of floaters trying to fix
things that break, with no one holding the reins, you get little
universes. Which is what happened and which we want to be proactive and
prevent in the future.

> You should probably look at other measures
> that involve your programmers more in making the coding a collective
> practice (peer review, for example). So long as the focus is constructive,
> it will help the group better understand what they should all be striving
> for and what they should all be doing. That more than anything will help
> prevent you from winding up in the same mess in a few years when you
> discover each person has their own coding ideas for whatever language you
> opt for.

Exactly! And a major decision is deciding on a technology so that we'll
all be using the same thing.

Actually, Java was a pretty easy decision to make, since we already had
a problem with Perl, no one wanted to do C or C++, and no one knows VB,
and most of us had used Java at some point along the way. HOWEVER, we
know we face a learning curve, and we want to get the most bang for the
buck, and we have a good enough handle on our Perl scripts so this
isn't a time critical desicion, so we are just looking.

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