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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."
... that it's because it's too complex for them. There's no pointy-clicky visual perl, and absolutely no correlation between code size and complexity. So they can neither hire a $35k/year H1Ber to do it, nor count lines of codes to measure complexity.
Oh, and without taking special measures, others get to see the code. Including sysadmins, who may laugh at the stupidity of the $35k programmers. Which doesn't make management look good.
Perl is the enfant terrible of the programming world. A very smart one, but requiring the same smartness of its users.
Particularly perl, even with coding standards, reasonable indentation, comments etc.
I stopped writing the stuff years ago because I realised that I was only making things worse. Perl encourages big ball of mud development. It's specifically designed as a "glue" language which lets you stick things together, in fact it's a sticking plaster language which allows you to paper over cracks which would be far better filled in another way.
Now if I see myself or others considering Perl to accomplish something, I'm pretty sure there's a problem with the entire approach.
Deleted
At the risk of starting a programming language holy war, can someone explain to me why someone would choose to start a new project in Perl instead of Python? From what I've seen, they both do essentially the same things in the same ways, and they're both (roughly) the same as far as language overhead (from language interpretation) is concerned. But from a readability perspective, there's no question that Python is miles ahead. (Perl's readability, or lack thereof, is literally the source of jokes) In the long run, this translates into lower total development budgets, which is something businesses like to hear. So, why would anyone choose Perl over Python?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I would also dispute the idea that the simplicity of newer code is necessarily a good thing. Maybe they are yet to find all the bugs that require inelegant solutions...
That could of course be the case.
But it is a fact that some programmers have slightly too much interest in "clever" tricks, compactness, and optimisations whether they're called for or not, and too little in clarity, modularity and maintainability.
I won't claim this as fact, but I also strongly suspect that this kind of programmer also tends to love perl (you find them everywhere though). Many lose these traits as they mature, get to experience the pain and cost of working other people's unreadable code, and as you get more proficient you simply aren't that impressed by low-level coding skills any more. But some seem incurable.
sudo ergo sum
People keep telling me that Perl is less readable than other languages, but i disagree. It's only less readable when you dont know the language specific semantics used - surely everyone remembers when they saw floor((float)i + 0.5) in C for the first time? It's no different to a perl programmer who uses @array = map { s/something/better/g } @data;
While I must admit that if you code in perl like a one-liner guru, you're not going to make particularly managable code but not coding in perl has significient RAD drawbacks. In Perl I worry about one thing: variable tainting. In C and C++ I have to worry about tainted variables, constant index-off-by-one errors, the possibility of null pointers and null reference handling, libraries and linking.
Some Perl programmers could do with more non perl experience to make their style managable. Perl 5 oop is a joke, and perl 6 is trollbait - but these aren't reasons why programmers shouldn't apply wider programming skills as a C/Jaava programmer uses their ADT knowledge and skill between langages.
Matt
As many others have pointed out, you can write bad code in any language. Perl makes it very easy to write terrible code, just as Perl makes it very easy to write just about anything else. There are other languages that place obstacles between you and the bad code you're trying to write - for example, Python won't let you not indent correctly, and Java won't let you not use OOP.
When coding large applications, it is critical that certain coding standards are followed. Everybody has to play by the rules, and do things in a standardized way. Perl doesn't impose any of these rules for you automatically. If you choose not to self-impose any rules, your code will wind up being an unmaintainable mess. But no language can save you from that - if you write terrible code in Python, it's guaranteed to be nicely indented, but that doesn't mean it'll be maintainable. And, if you want to self-impose some rules to help keep your code clean, Perl Best Practices will point you in the right direction.
I highly recommend The Daily WTF?. Perl does NOT get a disproportionally large representation there.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Or, to put it another way, correlation is not causation.
Perl has been around long enough (and, more to the point, was pretty much the only choice if you wanted a half-decent scripting language 10 years ago) that there's a strong chance in any business that badly-designed hard to maintain systems that have been around for 10 years or more include a fair chunk of Perl.
That's not because of Perl, that's because they were badly done in the first place. I'm willing to bet that there's just as much code which is written in Perl and does a perfectly good job but nobody really knows about it because it's been sitting in the background doing a perfectly good job for so long.
Look at this site: http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/
This site make the song "99 bottles of beer" into a program that displays the lyrics of 99 bottles of beer. Now look at the Java implementation, it's a bloody mess! Waaaay to complex in order to maintain flexibility. Now look at the a comment where another person has done the same thing but then in a simple manner.
Yes, you can make any language look butt ugly if you try.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.