ScriptingRouteToAgileness

One of the problems selling a new thing to your boss is demonstrating something useful with it that would be hard with the current setup.

This may be why many new Agile people come either from the Java world (where a lot of hard selling and tool development has gone on) or from the Python, Ruby (and Perl, but not so much I think) worlds.

With scripting you can whip something useful up fast, and the Python development community is picking up on testing etc as a core practice (I suspect Ruby is too).

(It helps that the tools are free).

--TomAyerst

Tom, I think the agile stuff is picked up by the Ruby and Python communities because they tend to be more cutting edge and more focused on OO (from which agility has come). Very little Perl development is OO. I am trying to promote these practices within the PHP community and am only really finding an audience with users who also use Java or who have already written an OO library or tool.

Another reason behind your observations could be that strong typing and lint like tools can be replaced by fine grain unit testing. This means that the scripting languages are in a position to grow just as much as the stronly types ones with these techniques. They also eliminate the redundant testing effect when strong types are not needed.

Of course all it takes is for a C++ user to enter this discussion and point out that agility is popular there to put the boot into the whole argument!

-- MarcuS

Free tools make a lot of difference. When I worked at large-anonymous-company, our manager told us we had a month to ship something in Java, but we had no IDE. She said that she'd put in a request for a JBuilder licence. By the time JBuilder arrived (a week later), we were all using IbmEclipse. I didn't need to settle for expensive imitations ;-)

--DafyddRees

I find the Perl comments odd, since I've found Perl people very amenable to agile practices. Especially since there is an active testing culture in Perl. Possibly there its the difference between the "quick script hack" people and the "application development" people?

XP and Perl fit together very well in my experience, since the XP practices stop one of the worst Perl problems (the tendency to write very clever line noise) dead in its tracks.

-- AdrianHoward