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Yeah, I'm not convinced. Not in the slightest. JPMorgan has something like 250,000 employees. Just think of how many divisions and departments there are. It

by kemiller2002 6y ago

Yeah, I'm not convinced. Not in the slightest. JPMorgan has something like 250,000 employees. Just think of how many divisions and departments there are. It might be that someone ran a report at a high level over some major projects and said, "We're not using it." I guarantee it's still there in pockets still being used and still being maintained.

jiofih 6y ago
I think you’ll need something more than a feeling, to disagree with the person tasked with finding uses of Perl at JP Morgan on how much Perl is used at JP Morgan Also it sounds like you didn’t read the piece as this comes right at the start: > search covering repositories with 50M lines of code and thousands of servers
- kemiller2002 6y ago
  Sure. Let me explain. 1. You notice how he said "Investment Bank". Guess what, that's not their entire business....not even in the slightest. Not even the most profitable. When I was there, they sold a significant portion of their investment services to buy more commercial, which is in an entirely different line of business. They aren't connected. Their systems are separate. 2. I worked there. I understand the absolute magnitude of how large their code bases are. The legacy software, the business processes. 1000s of servers, is nothing in a company that size. The division I worked for was a dust spec compared to the size of JPMC, and we had something like 300 servers on our own. We were a rounding error on the division's balance sheet. I should say, a division, of a division, of a division of a Line of Business. Multiply that by orders of magnitude and you begin to understand the size of their operations. Let me put this into perspective. A quick line count of the project I'm on, with 4 people and started 2 months ago (with npm packages granted) has over 500,000 lines of code. How big do you think JPMC's code bases are? 3. Do you honestly believe that a company that size tasked 1 person with just "removing PERL". Most of it was not being used anyway, and he "just did it." He just "searched" the repositories. How exactly do you think that worked? Do you think an EVP, a chief, just tasked 1 person with search "the codebases" across multiple lines of business? He might have done it for a division, a part of a LOB. I'll give him that, but not JPMorgan as a whole not even the the entirety of the investment arm. Think about how many legacy systems use PERL everything from legacy systems, to commercial ETLs. The amount of business knowledge held in those scripts, and making a mistake, even a minuscule one will cost potentially millions of dollars. What did he search? Did he do a Git search, or SVN, or CVS, or event maybe VSS? How many file and network shares? Did he have access to everything? All the devops stuff? What about all the things that are maintained by contractors and consultants? How about those?
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Author here. Definitely great questions. I would like to reply but this is touching sensitive information that I don't think I can publicly disclose. ^^ What I can maybe say, is that the scope is touching JP Morgan, the corporate and investment bank with maybe 40 000 employees. It is much broader than you think.
AThrowAway2718 6y ago
I concur. I'd have to reach out to my former colleagues but it seems possible that someone rooted out Perl in one or more departments or even a division but not for the entirety of JPMC. Ten years ago the word I heard was Python and people had shifted from Perl for new things.

jiofih 6y ago

I think you’ll need something more than a feeling, to disagree with the person tasked with finding uses of Perl at JP Morgan on how much Perl is used at JP Morgan Also it sounds like you didn’t read the piece as this comes right at the start: > search covering repositories with 50M lines of code and thousands of servers

kemiller2002 6y ago
Sure. Let me explain. 1. You notice how he said "Investment Bank". Guess what, that's not their entire business....not even in the slightest. Not even the most profitable. When I was there, they sold a significant portion of their investment services to buy more commercial, which is in an entirely different line of business. They aren't connected. Their systems are separate. 2. I worked there. I understand the absolute magnitude of how large their code bases are. The legacy software, the business processes. 1000s of servers, is nothing in a company that size. The division I worked for was a dust spec compared to the size of JPMC, and we had something like 300 servers on our own. We were a rounding error on the division's balance sheet. I should say, a division, of a division, of a division of a Line of Business. Multiply that by orders of magnitude and you begin to understand the size of their operations. Let me put this into perspective. A quick line count of the project I'm on, with 4 people and started 2 months ago (with npm packages granted) has over 500,000 lines of code. How big do you think JPMC's code bases are? 3. Do you honestly believe that a company that size tasked 1 person with just "removing PERL". Most of it was not being used anyway, and he "just did it." He just "searched" the repositories. How exactly do you think that worked? Do you think an EVP, a chief, just tasked 1 person with search "the codebases" across multiple lines of business? He might have done it for a division, a part of a LOB. I'll give him that, but not JPMorgan as a whole not even the the entirety of the investment arm. Think about how many legacy systems use PERL everything from legacy systems, to commercial ETLs. The amount of business knowledge held in those scripts, and making a mistake, even a minuscule one will cost potentially millions of dollars. What did he search? Did he do a Git search, or SVN, or CVS, or event maybe VSS? How many file and network shares? Did he have access to everything? All the devops stuff? What about all the things that are maintained by contractors and consultants? How about those?
- user5994461 6y ago
  Author here. Definitely great questions. I would like to reply but this is touching sensitive information that I don't think I can publicly disclose. ^^ What I can maybe say, is that the scope is touching JP Morgan, the corporate and investment bank with maybe 40 000 employees. It is much broader than you think.

AThrowAway2718 6y ago

I concur. I'd have to reach out to my former colleagues but it seems possible that someone rooted out Perl in one or more departments or even a division but not for the entirety of JPMC. Ten years ago the word I heard was Python and people had shifted from Perl for new things.