Comments on: Why Corporates Hate Perl

By: Samir

Samir — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 13:29:39 +0000

Perl has become the “Cobol” of the Corporate World, and thus the “dislike” that Corporate America seems to have with it. To me, Perl started off back in the day when it was not object oriented, and just a powerful scripting language where you can do whatever you want. As the Object Oriented model took place in Perl, it’s not like everybody converted to doing OO Perl right away. At the same time, existing programs worked – why change them? In that sense, I agree with Tudor that there was no refactoring….it serves no purpose if it meets the business needs.

Eventually I think when time for enhancements came, and the next set of guys looked at the code — they were like –WTF.

I think you have to understand where the language came from to where it is today to appreciate the development, but a lot of people forget that. So they look at the existing code, don’t get it, and blame Perl/language for the issues.

By: Andreas Wallberg

Andreas Wallberg — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:34:47 +0000

@Iain: I see where you are coming from. So what are we lacking, technology-wise, in Perl these days? My wishlist for Perl is:

* Mature, documented and well supported Qt-bindings for GUI programming
* Perl on Android
* Put the best of Moose in Perl’s standard library so that we have an OO-system that you can use on any machine without having to go to CPAN first. This is important in the bioinformatics research community where we pass around scripts and programs but where many users are not able to use CPAN, i.e. stop assuming that all Perl users are Perl developers.

By: Tudor Constantin

Tudor Constantin — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:14:51 +0000

There are also other issues with old apps – not only perl, but any kind of applications. Technical Debt, which accumulates over those 10+ years – it comes a time when it has to be paid. Managers and business people want features, they don’t care about refactorings, tdd and code quality – yet. They start to feel the burden of the technical debt when features are added much more slowly and with higher risks and negative side effects – that is when they decide it’s language’s fault and want a rewrite of the application. What they get is a payoff of the debt (if they manage to implement the rewriting), with debt starting to accumulate again, on the new technology stack.

By: Iain

Iain — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:19:19 +0000

Sadly, Perl is becoming less relevant as a “play mate” for newer technologies, too. I was at the All Your Base 2012 conference, in Oxford on Nov 23rd, and was twice struck by the absence of Perl from language binding lists — and one of those lists included Tcl!!!

It’s the second time I’ve witnessed a language pass over to the west, and it’s quite sad. The first was Rexx and ObjectRexx did nothing to revive the language. Sure, there are probably at least 3 people who will chime in with a pythonesque Rexx is not dead yet. And if we don’t start making Perl trendy again, that will also be its fate. Once we reach the tipping point, not even Perl6 will save it — if it even gets here before the next ice age.

God, I might have to start programming in PHP again… please, kill me now!

People in the Perl community are leaving for the new shiney. And (I’ll be controversial), I get the distinct impression that the “more beer for us” crowd are happy to see them go. Short-sight and stupid, and not helping. Oh, and there’s no shortage of ego and narcissism in what’s left of the community. Not pretty and quite repellent to new blood.

I was really happy to present at both of Richard Jelinek’s timely talks at LPW #9 this year. The problem with Perl is, in fact, us. Sure, we can blame managers, if we like, but we each need to shoulder the blame. Perhaps it’s time to stop asking what our language can do for us this week, and start reflecting on what we can do for our language.

How do we make Perl (and its community) more appealing to newbies? Or have we forgotten what was to be a newbie?

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:52:20 +0000

Sadly, far too much management is incapable of admission of having made a mistake. Therefore, by mismanaging the Perl development years ago, they, management, made a mistake.

But they are incapable of admitting that mistake. And it is easy to “blame Perl” instead.

Ten years on, if they commit the same mistakes with Java and PHP, they will be blaming Java and PHP instead of themselves and moving to the next flash in the pan save us all tech.

By: samuele

samuele — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:00:46 +0000

as far as i know, gabor, the same thing happens to .NET and JSP… so i can see why perl fits this list too.

By: Gabor Szabo

Gabor Szabo — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 05:33:17 +0000

I think I totally agree with your analysis. I usuall say the issues you see with Perl code in corporations are (mis)management issues.

It is also quite clear to me why management would want to blame something else, (in this case the language) instead of themselves. Who would want to admit failure?

I saw the above in many companies, but what struck me now, reading your post, if this only happened to Perl? Did the same not happen to other languages? Does it not happen to other languages now?
I mean both the badly written code, and then the blaming of the language instead of the people/process.