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Why Corporates Hate Perl
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Aug 20, 2008 03:02 AM
from the not-such-a-shiny-new-thing dept.
from the not-such-a-shiny-new-thing dept.
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."
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Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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.
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes me laugh (and cry at times) is these same businesses, who insist that programmers and administrators are hard to come by, turn to ridiculous metrics like "how many lines of code do you write per day", and require x number of years of experience with technologies which just came out this year (and have yet to be proven.)
Let them have their H1-Bs, and the deadwood with the inflated resumes. Good riddance.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There may be some architecture and best practices you have to meet in carrying out your implementation which is what this article is about I suppose. Perhaps integrating with other systems forces you to use a particular tool or language. However, in general you can do whatever you want as long as you fulfill the user and business requirements.
That could mean perl but usually we think of that as being a fancy bash script with perhaps a bit of database interaction rather than a platform for writing server-side (or even client-side?) apps.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
to me the biggest issue is maintainability, some languages help you in that department, some hinder.
Perl makes it easier than even C to write obfuscated bits of code that even the author has a hard time understanding a few months later.
I've seen perl used to create job security for it's coders, in that respect it is the new assembly language.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Funny)
to me the biggest issue is maintainability, some languages help you in that department, some hinder.
I quote the lecturer from my software maintenance course:
"As I understand it, the standard maintenance method with Perl is to start again."
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
One python coder here was scared because I was writing some tools in PERL that he was going to have to use and maintain. He complained PERL looked so terrible and was so horrible to follow that he wasn't sure he'd be able to do it.
Then he saw my code, and understood every line of it...
I'm like the anti-PERL PERL programmer (although I don't even use it myself anymore). He was absolutely right... when there was a more obscure way to do something, but it saved two characters of code, the PERL programmer would do it. My code was pretty verbose and easy to read.
If I was passing those scripts off to other PERL programmers, they'd have mocked my style.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Funny)
oh, don't worry, they'll be brief, this is perl, right ?
Whether you'll be able to read them though, that's a different matter altogether ;)
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Funny)
All Perl needs is a shiny new catch phrase...
Perl on Rails?
CloudPerl?
Extreme Perl?
Perl#?
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Funny)
Well you're a C++ programmer so your vote on elegant OO is NULL and void* :-P
I jest, I jest.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief, how is "deliverables" a stupid metric. Either you deliver a working solution/program on time or you don't. Thats the deliverable. Bascially your saying that having and goal and having to deliver anything is stupid.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lines per day is frequently proposed and sometimes implemented. But it's also easy to kill, just do that little refactoring job you've been putting off and put in a report of minus two thousand lines.
They tend to get the message after that.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect they merely have associated "Perl" with "bad" because the existing cruft happens to be in Perl. Because there are very few managers who understand the difference between programming languages.
Besides, you can create an unholy mess in any programming language.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes! Book recommendations for Perl programmers, outside of the standard ones you need :
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.
Parent
Re:Ockham's Razor tells me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
At my last job, I wrote a perfectly good perl loader for a large data file we'd bring in every night. They decided to kill it off and go with BusinessWorks instead. BW took 45 times longer (I shit you not -- 45 minutes instead of 1 minute) and broke every week. We finally got sick of the support issues and went back to perl.
Fact is that shiny pointy clicky just introduces complexity and additional points of failure into the infrastructure. If you want the latest buzzwords, then by all means, go with shiny pointy clicky. If you want your system to work, keep it with tried and true.
This has been said ad nauseum: There's nothing inherent about perl that makes its programs unmaintainable or broken. It's all about getting programmers who know how to write maintainable, well-designed code. A bad programmer can make an abortion of any programming language or fancy pointy clicky system.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly not the best example of why perl is shunned.
Perl is simply not winning the marketing war.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Funny)
Do you need help with regular expression?
http://houghi.org/shots/vim001.gif [houghi.org]
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at this site: http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/ [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.
Parent
It's the slashdot effect! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
To be fair to the corporates (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:To be fair to the corporates (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell I've seen developers say C/C++ are "dead" and that shiny_language_x is going to take over.
That may be not so much fadism as well-informed wishful thinking.
OK, plain C is not _that_ bad, but you do need to fight its innate spirit in order to implement sane coding practices.
But I recently had to return to C++ on a recent project, and although I was expecting some tedium, it was way worse that I remembered. MY GOD how painful it makes a lot of really trivial things. Even the nasty hack known as PHP starts looking well planned in this light.
It may be better than alernatives if you really need the performance and low-level capabilities, but if you don't (or only a small part of your project does), you're paying a huge price for wizard points you don't need.
Glitzy clicky interfaces do not a good product make, but a platform where _some_ thought has been given to workflow really is something we should start to expect in this day and age.
Parent
Why not Python? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [bbspot.com] 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?
Re:Why not Python? (Score:5, Insightful)
Very simple:
* the user has deep knowledge of perl but not of pythong
* the program needs certain libs that are easy available for perl but not for python
* the user is not very keen on the syntax of python
* there already exists a lot of perl code & libs that can be re-used and would need to be re-written to python
whenever you start something from scratch in a different language you have to see if it pays off. If you already have tons of libs & classes and knowledge in one language there is no need to write it in another again.
That's why I code my scripts still in perl, because I know what I am doing, I am fast, I get it done and I have classes that help me do the things I want to do. I see no reason why I should start again in python. I really don't have the time to re-do everything from scratch ...
Parent
Re:Why not Python? (Score:5, Funny)
Reason is simple.
Pearls are shiny and worth a lot.
Pythons are scary, they can bite, and have venom and stuff.
Rubies on the other hand are a viable replacement for pearl.
Parent
Why Corp. hate Perl? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Why Corp. hate Perl? (Score:5, Funny)
Perl 1.0 was released in 1987, four years before Python. How old is your dad - and more to the point, how old are you?
Parent
Perl too readable (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Perl too readable (Score:5, Insightful)
I respectfully disagree. Which languages are easier to read and which ones are harder is of course obviously subjective. So maybe for YOU perl is easy to read. However, I myself have never, ever read or written (or written and then later read) perl code that was easy to read. There are lots and lots of very very small symbols which have very large effects on Perl code. Single characters can completely change the meaning of statements in perl. Sure that's true in many languages, but perl takes this problem to a whole new level.
Perl will die if people in general find it to be too troublesome to write and maintain. I personally have been in that camp for years and years. This article suggests that this is a global trend, and I say, good riddance.
C++ and perl are such different languages, that it's not really useful to compare them. They live in completely different parts of the programming language space. So it's not very useful for me to say that I find it much easier to write maintainable C++ code than perl code, even though it's true.
One thing that really disappoints me about C++ is the direction that it's been heading for the past 5 or 6 years - "template programming". In fact it's about as bad as perl in terms of readability and maintainability, but much worse for debuggability. I can't think of any programming "language" worse than C++ template programming. I stay away from Boost and really hate what it's doing to C++.
Parent
"Hate" isn't the right word. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
For goodness sake, move on. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
This is an insult (Score:5, Funny)
This is an insult to associate us Perl-Haters with corporate types.
Writing bad code (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [google.com] will point you in the right direction.
I highly recommend The Daily WTF? [thedailywtf.com]. Perl does NOT get a disproportionally large representation there.
It's possible to write rubbish in any language (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
How about the right tool for the job? (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Larry Wall, author of Perl
I rest my case.
Quality vs Complexity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Age (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Clarity and whatnot is for retards. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really fair to blame the language? I think the reason perl is the centre of so many big balls of mud is that it is easy to do prototypes in it. If people choose to take those prototypes and turn them into big balls of mud, then that is their own fault. If you start with a clean sheet of paper, do a good design and then decide to implement it in perl you won't end up with a big ball of mud.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The language itself is not the problem, but the 'community' and their promotion of it may be. I have seen good Perl written by good corporate developers, but that's despite the available Perl tutorial and examples.
I can't recall seeing a Perl learning resource that presents code that is well structured, commented, and tolerant of bad inputs. That leads me to suspect that Perl attracts developers who take pride in hacking together "Works For Me" code in the shortest possible time using the fewest, tersest lines. Yes, you can do that in a C-like language, but Perl lets you get your "good enough" result faster.
When Perl is promoted by impatient, sloppy bodgers, it's no mystery why it would attractd similarly minded developers. It doesn't have to be that way, but that does seem to be the de facto situation.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl attracts developers who take pride in hacking together "Works For Me" code in the shortest possible time using the fewest, tersest lines. Yes, you can do that in a C-like language, but Perl lets you get your "good enough" result faster.
For me, that's the strength of Perl. I don't use it for anything other than works-for-me type small tidbits of code. Will it require maintenance, or extending, or support by other people? Then I don't use Perl, because it's complex enough to warrant a strict language. In essence, text parsing and one-off scripts are fantastic, other stuff I stay away from.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I see this claim all the time - "it's not Perl, it's that people write bad Perl."
Well then, why is bad Python a million times easier to read?
I also hear that Perl is great because you can write things quickly. This completely disregards the fact that you can write quickly in many other languages, that do not have the same "ball of mud" tendencies.
I also think that those Perl mantras: "laziness impatience and hubris" are not virtues and nor is having a thousand different ways to do things - this just leads to code that can only be read by one person.
Being methodical, aiming for clarity and simplicity, avoiding obscure functionality - this is what leads to code that can be maintained. Perl does not encourage any of these virtues.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is.
It's like saying "Most Basic & VB Code is Verbose, is it really fair to blame the language?"
YES!!
Every language has a unique idiom. And the best languages use this idiom to painlessly guide the developer to best practices.
For exammple, lots of devs consider Java to be over-engineered and overly-complex. You've probably heard a dev talk about building something in, say, RoR in a week that would've taken 4 weeks in Java.
That's probably true, because Java is a tool best designed for large applications and when you're using Java, it's idiom guides you into building multi-tiered architecture.
Python's idiom guides devs into producing well formatted code and it's a great language for web apps because it puts powerful data structures right in the developers face.
C# is a FANTASTIC language for teaching OOD to procedural developers. It's HARD for a procedural developer to think in terms of object hierarchies. The mechanics are easy to pick up. The ability to deconstruct a problem into an object hierarchy is hard.
But you put them in front of a new project in C# and the language -- entirely OO itself -- just guides a developer to the right thing. It's very hard to shoe-horn a procedural architecture into an OO-only language.
JavaScript makes it insanely easy to create an event-driven application. Anonymous functions, LAMBDAs, etc, guide a developer into producing code in an event/event-handler model.
Any developer can do nearly anything with any language. But a language itself can make it easy and obvious when you're doing things right, and painful for you when you're doing them wrong. And a good IDE will reinforce both of these behaviors.
Parent
Re:Perl IS the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two problems with this analysis. The first is that you (as many coders do) assume that tools that require intelligence on the part of the coder is an unalloyed good. Businesses, however, don't see it that way, especially large ones with many coders.
As Dave Clark once said in a different context, and architecture is partly there to tell you what you *can't* do. Programming languages are like that as well. Java is very good at encouraging certain idioms and discouraging others. Perl is not so good at either thing. Organizations that want structure will also want languages that support structure.
The answer "But its their fault for hiring dumb coders!" won't wash, because when you are the gas company working on maintaining a legacy billing system, you have to hire coders of average quality, and a language that allows coders of average quality to do stupid things is inferior to a language that shapes their work, *even if it slows them down*.
The second problem with this argument is fetishization of the individual coder, when most large codebases, esp in businesses, are social affairs. Even stipulating the impossibility that every business should hire only coders of above-average intelligence, different coders are intelligent in different ways. When 'Code as thou wilt' is the whole of the law, confusion abounds.
Did you ever see Rael Dornfest's bloxom blog project? Elegant, tight perl that did stuff like string replace on slashes in a fiel path to get an array of dir names, the file name itself, *and* kept the number of substitutions as a variable for traversal depth, in a single line. It was smart, but it also took other coders a long time to understand the JAPHishness of that single line of code, because it was doing three things at once.
Interestingly, he re-wrote it in Python, and its better, mainly because you can't do stuff like use the Boolean return of an assignment as a side-effect for an if test, and there's no concept of $_. Perl doesn't require JAPHishness and Python doesn't completely banish it, but other things being equal, Python produces more sociable code.
Once you start seeing the business imperative as enabling a group of acceptably competent programmers to work together, rather than being a platform for individual brilliance, the original article starts to look a lot more sensible.
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Re:Perl is WRITE-ONLY language. (Score:5, Insightful)
>IMHO, a syntax where you have to prefix a variable with a special character ($ 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".
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Re:heyho, python - the new perl. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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