The same is true by the way for commercial enterprises. Many of them have big financial problems and I think bigger ones than open source. Open source projects are more resilient because they can just slow down a bit in bad times and later revive. Commercial enterprises either work or they die.
Yes it's true, scripters are discriminated but I doubt that it is only because scripting languages are considered to be inferior to "real" programming languages by IT managers. It's also because scripting is associated with hacking away without thinking. This view doesn't do justice to many users of scripting languages and even less to the languages themselves.
However I do feel that the impression, that pure scripters are, on average, not the most meticulous software designers in the world is not completely contrived, especially when I read many of the comments in this forum. Claims of Perl programmers being thousands of times more productive than Java or C++ programmers are simply ridiculous. This only shows complete lack of understanding for the role of programming languages in the overall software engineering process. But even without things like analysis, design, deployment, maintainance, team communication and so on, I challenge anyone to choose a programming task that he can solve in hours using Perl and that would take me months to solve in Java or C++.
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The same is true by the way for commercial enterprises. Many of them have big financial problems and I think bigger ones than open source. Open source projects are more resilient because they can just slow down a bit in bad times and later revive. Commercial enterprises either work or they die.
However I do feel that the impression, that pure scripters are, on average, not the most meticulous software designers in the world is not completely contrived, especially when I read many of the comments in this forum. Claims of Perl programmers being thousands of times more productive than Java or C++ programmers are simply ridiculous. This only shows complete lack of understanding for the role of programming languages in the overall software engineering process. But even without things like analysis, design, deployment, maintainance, team communication and so on, I challenge anyone to choose a programming task that he can solve in hours using Perl and that would take me months to solve in Java or C++.