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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.
Could it be that, as well as being from an era of more ad-hoc approaches, the code is simply showing its age? System tend to get modified over time, and such modification is often done by multiple people under multiple managers.
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...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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
I see the same thing with developers in general. Nobody wants to use Perl anymore, PHP was the new thing, and now Ruby is eclipsing that. Now I'm not talking about cases where the new language legitimately makes something much easier, I'm talking about a good deal of fanboy-ish "Oh I do all my code in Ruby now because it's way better!"
It isn't just PHBs, programmers themselves seem to fall victim to fads in development. They want to use the new shiny stuff, simply because it is new and shiny. Hell I've seen developers say C/C++ are "dead" and that shiny_language_x is going to take over.
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
Regular expressions are by no means a perl-only feature.
Possibly not the best example of why perl is shunned.
Perl is simply not winning the marketing war.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Hmm let me think:
- Few Perl Developers
- Difficult (or impossible) to maintain
- There are better alternatives
- Easy to write badly difficult to write well (e.g. Language doesn't lend its self to good practices)
Perl is a dying language and frankly it is easy to see why. The real question is what does Perl do better than the competition other than being older than my Dad and having a bunch of essentially pointless libraries?
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
The problem is, Perl is just a programming language, not a conceptual system. Arguably it is the antithesis of a conceptual system. Many teams then create their own application frameworks atop it (e.g. Mason, POE), and it's rare for these frameworks to be compatible since Perl offers so many variations in the construction of even standard programming artifacts like classes & objects.
In addition, the level of expression (i.e. TMTOWTDI) means in practice that highly varying programming styles occur throughout large, long-lived bodies of code.
As a result, significant Perl-based business applications tend to become hard-to-maintain hairballs of divergent style and subtly variegated concept.
The root cause: as I started with; the absence of a standard conceptual framework for Perl means that during the early phases of a project, it's much harder to reason meaningfully about the eventual form of the system than it is with, say, Java or .NET where many of the design patterns are explicitly standardised.
I wouldn't say that "Corporates Hate Perl". It's just the Perl as an application language doesn't suit the formal design & architecture process we're seeing increasingly as IT departments start to grow up and realise that they're not the most important people in the company.
That doesn't disqualify Perl from being a useful tool, and it'll always have a place in data transformation, but it does mean that Perl isn't going to be one of the general-purpose application programming languages of the future.
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
This is an insult to associate us Perl-Haters with corporate types.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Your regexp example isn't awfully good - any language that has regexp support will have lines like that. These days, PHP has regexp support (possibly always has), C has regexp support, C++ has it, Java has it, and I expect that even C# has regexp libraries.
The alternative to a regular expression is usually a very convoluted parser that's a lot of effort to support.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
so, what happened to java? I liked it, it never went away but seems to hover on the edge.
On the edge of what? Java is the biggest programming language in the world today. It dominates the web and mobile phones, and although it's not quite as popular for desktop programs, it's not uncommon there either.
It's not a scripting language like Perl, however, so if your world looks like Perl, you may not notice Java that much.
Your assertion that Java 'dominates the web' is laughable, as applets have been a near-total failure, replaced wholesale by Flash- and AJAX-based systems, while on the backend PHP, Perl and more recently Python and Ruby have eaten Java's lunch. Where Java has succeeded is on big iron and with corporate accountingware (it is the new COBOL, much as C# is the new VB), and on mobile phones (as you stated), with some moderate success on the desktop.
-- Larry Wall, author of Perl
I rest my case.
My signature is in the cloud.
For example look at this s!(?:^|\w*/|\.\./|\./)[^\s,@;:]*(?<=/)([^\s,@;:]+?)(?=[\s,@;:]|$)!$1!g;
But this "Perl" code is really a regular expression which is also used in PCRE and PHP and so on. Copied because it was the best there was.
To improve readability of a regex use best practise and use /x (with whitespace and comments) and stop confusing Perl and regex.
From a manager's point of view, yes. Because it makes it easier for the company to find someone who is capable of maintaining it once the 133t haX0r has moved on to another job.
Besides, don't underestimate the importance of clarity and modularity in architecture. Which is not the same as "coding standards" that enforce things like naming schemes for variables. The latter is rather low-level and understandable to a PHB, the former is still more of an art and not easily measurable.
C - the footgun of programming languages
>IMHO, a syntax where you have to prefix a variable with a special character ($ in Perl's case) is a bad syntax.
The argument isn't really about syntax; it is rather the strong-typing versus weak-typing argument,
and that is worthy of far more investigation than simply declaring it "bad".
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
chomp is not ambiguous. RTFM and stop crying.
http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html
This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the English module). It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It's often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record when you're worried that the final record may be missing its newline. When in paragraph mode ($/ = "" ), it removes all trailing newlines from the string. When in slurp mode ($/ = undef ) or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a reference to an integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won't remove anything. If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_ . Example:
If anything I'm crying harder after reading that.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
s!(?:^|\w*/|\.\./|\./)[^\s,@;:]*(? Interesting? Thats a one line regexp which does something which appears to be very very simple to do, but actually isnt.
That looks really simple? Sorry but it doesn't look to me. Perl may be a a very very powerful language, but that alone does not make it a language of choice.
Well that is a regular expression, not Perl. It's a different language, and is the standard way of handling strings in most programming languages. To be honest, I first learned about them in a formal language class in college, years before I picked up Perl.
If you don't like regular expressions, that's your choice, but it really has nothing to do with Perl, and you should try to understand them, as they are very useful, even outside programming.
As a software manager what i'm interested in is developing quality applications. The biggest cost in software is maintenance. If a language is difficult to read by the original author it will be impossible to maintain by anyone else.
I would consider Python because it encourages good design and readable code. Professionally I use Java because I can easily hire people who use it, and it also encourages good design and readable code, if a tad verbose.
Perl is very consise, but also difficult to read. It turns into a maintenance nightmare, and there are far fewer developer who know Perl.
Python is far better; it is more consise than Java, has similar OO features, is readable. It isn't quite up to replacing Java, but has impressed me and many other Java coders.
Oh, and I have no sympathy for coders who think they are so cool being able to code in ways nobody else understands. I would rather see a slightly slower algorithm thats clear than a fast one that is unmaintainable.
Complex code is the enemy of quality, as is premature optimization.
Do you need help with regular expression?
http://houghi.org/shots/vim001.gif
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Interesting that you got modded so high, despite failing to understand what the GP was saying.
I'm not positive what that regexp is doing, but the presence of / and ../ or ./ matches suggests it's manipulating a directory path in some way. After a few tests I think it may be intending to return the filename portion from a path, but if so it's a little buggy (and a good example of why reinventing the wheel isn't a great idea; just use basename).
You do make a point, but I feel your method of comparison is a bit questionable. While Python is a fairly old language, it's only seen general use for a very short period of time compared to Perl. That means that a) there's likely to be a lot more Perl code around than Python code, and b) a lot of the Python code that's around will be of high quality.
The main reason for this is that when a language first begins to be noticed, it's usually going to be embraced by people who want to show how good it is. They'll take extra care to make sure it's well written and easy to understand, because they're evangelizing the language. As a language ages, people will be using it who really don't give a crap about the quality of the code, and that will "pollute" your sample set.
Accessibility will also have a lot to do with it. Even when PHP was a pretty new language, a random sample of code would reveal it to be vastly inferior to just about every other language you could possibly think of. A lot of this is simply because PHP became so widespread that virtually every cheap (and many free) web hosts supported it, so every newbie who wanted to learn to program started with PHP.
A new programmer -- or a bad programmer -- can write terrible Python code just as easily as they can write terrible Perl code. But at least it will have proper indentation. I would be very hesitant to base too much of my assessment of a language on its "newbie safety factor". Else we'd all be using BASIC and Logo.
The problem here is that small != mean efficient.
Parsing the code is not what makes a program slow, and
we don't code for 1K or RAM anymore.
"impressive" oneliners completely fail to impress me.
Lines are cheap.
Time is not.
And bugs are expensive as hell.
I'm sure if you wrote code that walked through the
steps in what you are trying to achieve, all the
following would be quicker:
* for me to see the point of what you're doing
* for me to correctly change what it does.
* for you to get it working right in the first place.
If you feel it is childish to write code like
"find A"
"find B based on A"
"generate C based on B"
"silently fail for some values of C"
"replace B with C"
-rather than one giant, brittle regex-replace, I submit that you are the childish one.
sudo ergo sum
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.
So true.
I switched to Python because I could not market Perl to anybody including myself.
I was using it from time to time and would try to convince coworkers to use it too.
But the readability issues and the lack of keywords made it more difficult to look for documentation etc.
As a result I could not market it to my coworkers and started having serious doubts myself. So I switched to Python.
Suddenly, I could convince my coworkers easily as it looked good, readable, easy to learn by example etc.
Also Perl and Python are very similar in what they offer (regexps, hashtables, string parsing, networking, modules). But Python usually offers a language construct to support important software engineering concepts (e.g. objects are native and not reimplemented every time as in Perl).
Just my 2 cents. I tried to love Perl and market it around me. But I couldn't. PHP, Python, Linux, Wikis are easy sells but Perl is not.
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.
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