Microsoft at the Perly Gates

1999-06-07

So, Microsoft are to “extend Perl to take advantage of Windows capabilities”. Well, well. We saw it with Java, we saw it with HTML – in both cases, the company were quite rightly accused of taking an open standard and extending it to lock users into the Windows platform. It may be that their approach to Perl is different – goodness knows that Windows lacks a scripting language of any merit, so the logic of porting Perl to Windows is clear.

Can we give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt? Put it this way. If Microsoft are to be trusted with yet another standard, namely XML, then they need to have quit their old “standardisation” tricks. Perl can be the test case: we watch their every move with eager anticipation.

(First published 7 June 1999)