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

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

[chthon]

Yes! Book recommendations for Perl programmers, outside of the standard ones you need :

• Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway. This one is really mandatory.
• Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus, to understand why Perl is so powerful.
• How To Design Programs, which taught me better ways of using Perl, even though the book is based upon Scheme.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is somewhat the bridge between HTDP and Higher-Order Perl.

All the rest I learned from the camel book. I use Perl on three platforms (Win32, Cygwin and Solaris), using the same libraries, and now also adding Perl/TK to the mix.

If you need to define several goals, I would recommend Perl Best Practices for writing maintainable and easy to read code and installing a peer review process.

HTDP is more for individual programmers, to become smarter and better programmers.

Re:heyho, python - the new perl.

[Fross]

Applets? This isn't 1998.

If you missed it, this thred is about corporates. All the big players - governments, big iron (ibm, etc), large enterprise developers (logica, capita, etc), military and most cutting-edge science development projects, use Java for Enterprise-grade applications.

Sure, the front-end desktop/browser embedded side is dominated by flash and ajax, with flex on the rise. But only small to medium development houses use much PHP and Python. Ruby is too new/too niche for now, and Perl *is* legacy, due to too few developers around, and no major new projects being written in it (Thank God).

Thanks for playing, try again sometime.

Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest

[parnold]

How long would it take you to debug that problem?

About 12 seconds. Run Python with the -tt option and it will tell you about lines with inconsistent use of tabs and spaces.