Cheer up, John, it could be worse. You could be trying to get an IE-based web app to work, a web app that depends on a third-party ActiveX control that is no longer being produced that in turn depends on system-supplied DLLs that have since been deleted by a security update from the mother ship. Yes, I have dealt with just this problem recently. No, I cannot look in the mirror and say "I found a solution" without crossing my fingers behind my back.
Compared to that, getting Perl extensions to work on VMS is, though challenging at times, pure pleasure. At least I've never heard of a system-supplied library on VMS simply disappearing after the application of an ECO. And both Perl and VMS have good debuggers, and most of the relevant pieces are open source except the C compiler, but if I have trouble with that, I post here or in another public forum and the maintainer or the maintainer's boss shows up to help me out.
