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:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest

[arth1]

A 100K/year good programmer can also have difficulties understanding perl code.

You don't have to understand how to read it, beyond grepping for comments and function names. You have to understand how to write it.

Perl is a very very powerful language. A small change can make the code do something completely different, hence the fear.

Which is why you never do a "small change". You replace non-functioning code with functioning code.

This is why specs and comments that document the API, and not just the code, is crucial. It allows you to replace code far easier.