Not sure if this is true in general. I work at a bank. We use a lot of Perl. Banks existed long before "the web", and our Perl stuff is not a web application either. All the internal web apps are Java.
It is kind of weird, actually -- Java for stuff like the HR apps, and Perl for the stuff that makes us money. (If it were my decision, I would use Perl for the web apps and Haskell for the algorithmic stuff... but it's not.)
That's interesting! That's the last thing I would expect from a bank actually, wonder how common that is.
But then again, is there even an 'enterprise scripting language' ?
> All the internal web apps are Java.
That's what I would expect. Sun really did some good marketing in that sphere.
>That's interesting! That's the last thing I would expect from a bank actually, wonder how common that is.
I've seen a lot of Perl used in banking/finance. It really is the "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" and certainly seemed to have almost completely replaced shell scripting in the last place I worked at. One interesting anecdote about Perl was that a group I worked in originally chose ADA as their language when they were just starting out but eventually gave up and went with Perl just because of it's relative power and simplicity. That company also has a major initiative to replace alot of what was written in Perl (and runs the company to this day) with a system written in Java. That system is still not doing any serious production work and is at least a couple years late. I don't think it has as much to do with the Java language as the "this will be the mother of all systems" approach they tried to take with it in the beginning though.
Yours and gcheong's comment just above makes me wonder if someone missed the boat in getting an enterprise level scripting language out the door. It looks like there never was a 'natural' successor to stuff like JCL.
PHP, Python and perl are rarely seen at corporations that existed before the web came around. Their whole IT department is set up around a different kind of environment.
I think this is in part why the web is so disruptive, because it enables all these upstarts using very light and nimble stuff to challenge the big and established companies directly.
You can pretty much tell what is enterprise stuff and what is 'quick & dirty but does the job' by comparing hourly rates for programmers.
It also has everything to do with the length of time before someone can be productive in a new environment. If that length of time is very short then there is not a very high barrier, which tends to create a lot of 'wannabe' programmers in that language.
By raising the bar you only end up with people that are willing to invest a large amount of time in a platform, that tends to favour people that get paid for their work, which in turn is found mostly in enterprise locations.