Why Corporates Hate Perl

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

Comments

Perl is WRITE-ONLY language.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl is WRITE-ONLY language.
You have to be a well-disciplined person an write the comments for every line of Perl code otherwise
it's hard to decrypt the flow. Such things happens
rarely in other languages (C++/Java/Python).
IMHO, a syntax where you have to prefix a variable with a special character ($ in Perl's case) is a bad syntax.

Clarity and whatnot is for retards.

[tjstork]

they're called for or not, and too little in clarity, modularity and maintainability

I've been around the block long enough to know that what this often is an excuse for corporate environments to hold better developers back to try and force a levelling of a pay scale. If you paid developers based on their ability to produce working systems, you would find that some developers produce far more than others. But.... now we have to riddle our code with wrapped access methods, ultra long symbol names, case sensitivity and standards made by morons for morons, and all of it adds -ZERO- features to the finished product. Sure, you can argue that it makes "better" code, but that "better" code has NO MORE EXTRA FEATURES. It only allows retards to work on it. And really, is that a feature?

Re:Perl IS the problem

[Alioth]

There's an old proverb: 'A bad worker blames his tools'.

I don't have this problem with Perl.

Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest

[Paolone]

That looks really simple? Sorry but it doesn't look to me.

You fail the reading test. It says "[it] does something that looks very simple [but it's not]".

Fact that there is to much f*cked up perl code, shows that it is an inferior language.

By this metric, just need to release crappy python code in the intertubes to make it inferior.

Time for the "Perl is dying" troll?

[ariels]

Please place all "Perl is dying" trolls below this note.

Re:Perl IS the problem

[Rogerborg]

If I don't know about them, and have to search for them, then they're not representative of the Perl programming community. Are they?

Re:Ockham's Razor tells me....

[synthespian]

How about the braindead attitude of people talking thing out of their assholes, like uh, regular code is more readable and sigils are unreadable.

How do you know? HOW do you know that?!

Until somebody comes along with a thorough investigation in the cognitive aspects of programming, I will argue that regular code turns your brain off, because it's tedious and sigils provide "hooks" for attention and improve cognition by compacting and abstracting a lot of things.

I am not talking about "obfuscated Perl" - just like we normally don't talk of "obfuscated C" in the wild - that would be *so* dishonest (yet a lot of people wann play that card in an argument).

Now, I am just venting things out of my ass, but to me, it smells better than yours.