3 ms·
As someone who has worked in a few investment banks, Perl is a SIGNIFICANTLY larger problem than COBOL. While verbose, COBOL enforced structure and discipline,
by JackFr 10y ago
As someone who has worked in a few investment banks, Perl is a SIGNIFICANTLY larger problem than COBOL.
While verbose, COBOL enforced structure and discipline, and it is very possible for code to be maintained by someone other than the author.
On the other hand in the 90's and early 2000's many critical pieces of software were written in Perl. While it is quite suited as a scripting or glue language, I've seen elaborate integrated systems written in cryptic, unstructured and undisciplined Perl, often with proprietary extensions.
And no one learns Perl anymore.
There is no way to maintain these projects, and in at least two projects I've seen, what should have been a straightforward change lead to a large scale retire-and-replace project.
- PaulHoule 10y agoHell yeah. Every time I've written Perl with another programmer, I learned something new.
- EvanAnderson 10y agoI dread working on Perl code I wrote even just a few years ago. If I've context-switched away from the code for more than just a few months it often looks incomprehensible. It really is a write-only language.
- woliveirajr 10y agoSometimes the "no one learns Perl anymore" just means that no one is willing to pay a good money for some change that the company wants.
- protomyth 10y agoYep. I know Perl (5 not 6) really well and programmed in it for about 10 years. No one I've seen actually wants to hire for it. I'm fine with that because it wasn't something I loved much like the Transact-SQL programming (love Objective-C and looks like Swift will be more work not love).
- collyw 10y agoThats seems true. I have a Perl jobs group on Facebook, and the salaries are a fair bit lower than for Django (which I currently do).
- lightedman 10y agoPERL is on of my biggest headaches. Using it in conjunction with an AS/400 to manage an inventory system for tractor parts still gives me uncomfortable dreams to this day. I had to learn it from my stepmother who was working at the same company and was the one handling most of the database (I just needed my own version for better location tracking in the warehouse.) I would've much preferred to have done that in RPG.
- collyw 10y agoI hope this is the case, as I quite liked doing Perl before I switched to Python. (Saying that I can imagine that there is some horrendous Perl out in the wild).