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Why Corporates Hate Perl

Posted by kdawson on from the not-such-a-shiny-new-thing dept.

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."

6 of 963 comments (clear)

  1. It's the slashdot effect! by pjf · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's simple why businesses don't like Perl. Slashdot is written in Perl. Whenever a business is mentioned on slashdot, their website goes down. Ergo, Perl is bad for business.

  2. For goodness sake, move on. by PinkyDead · · Score: 5, Funny

    You have to migrate your badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code into badly written and hard-to-maintain Java code as soon as possible.

    --
    Genesis 1:32 And God typed :wq!
  3. Re:Why Corp. hate Perl? by ggvaidya · · Score: 5, Funny

    other than being older than my Dad

    Perl 1.0 was released in 1987, four years before Python. How old is your dad - and more to the point, how old are you?

  4. Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... by xaxa · · Score: 5, Funny

    to me the biggest issue is maintainability, some languages help you in that department, some hinder.

    I quote the lecturer from my software maintenance course:
    "As I understand it, the standard maintenance method with Perl is to start again."

  5. Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... by pdbaby · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well you're a C++ programmer so your vote on elegant OO is NULL and void* :-P

    I jest, I jest.

    --
    Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
  6. Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... by FrozenFOXX · · Score: 5, Funny

    All Perl needs is a shiny new catch phrase... Perl on Rails? CloudPerl? Extreme Perl? Perl#?

    How about "Perl Necklace?"

    --
    "Just a fox, a whisper."