6 ms·

> its cheaper to hire one smart dev who can learn Perl to maintain than to hire a whole team to re-write in a new PL. Short term? Probably. Long term? Probabl

> its cheaper to hire one smart dev who can learn Perl to maintain than to hire a whole team to re-write in a new PL. Short term? Probably. Long term? Probably not. At one point your _one_ Perl developer will disappear, and while you held onto that one person, the Perl language has faded even more into oblivion, making it literally _impossible_ for you to hire people to maintain your product.

dspillett 6y ago
> Long term? Probably not. If companies are sensible and have learned from past issues, yes. But I live in the real world, so no! Reference: the COBOL programmers pulled out of retirement en-mass in the late 90s to perform Y2K audits/fixes. > to maintain your product. Often with Perl it isn't the end product that is the issue, that is more likely to have been ported to some other language/framework, but instead all that Perl is managing IT and project infrastructure.
- thatwasunusual 6y ago
  >> Long term? Probably not. > If companies are sensible and have learned from past issues, yes. But I live in the real world, so no! In my world, more and more companies learns from past issues/failures. They also live in the same world as you do, which sees a decline in both number of Perl programmers and a decline in general usage of the language itself.[1][2][3] > Reference: the COBOL programmers pulled out of retirement en-mass in the late 90s to perform Y2K audits/fixes. That was 20 years ago. Plus, it's not a good thing that people are "pulled out of retirement" to fix things. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202020-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F05zrn https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202... [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...
  - edoceo 6y ago
    > In my world, more and more companies learns from past issues/failures. Welcome to earth! We don't do it that way here.
    - thatwasunusual 6y ago
      Not Perl's - or any other programming language's - problem if a company doesn't know how to do their stuff.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    > That was 20 years ago. Correct. Longer if you count people in the 80s working to fix affected code that caused problems for 20-to-25 year term financial arrangements and so forth. I'm not saying it was recent, just this is a good example and one I don't think many have sufficiently learned from (too many think it was a fuss over nothing, when really it was a fuss to make sure it was nothing). > Plus, it's not a good thing that people are "pulled out of retirement" to fix things. I make no claim that it is a good thing. Just that it happened, has happened far more than that one big event, and similar things will continue to happen at different scales. I could (but for commercial and legal reasons, shouldn't and won't) name specific examples of companies relying on systems written in elderly languages/frameworks, apparently locked to old versions of software components or hardware that they just hope won't break before they finally get budget for something new (which isn't likely to happen for a reasonable definition of "soon" under the circumstances) because finding the right people to fix it would be somewhere between gloriously expensive and actually impossible.
brokenkebab 6y ago
Yes, but in the long term everything will break, no matter what language one uses. The question is how long is long? I suppose when talking about PLs it's proportional to amount of working code in the wild.
- thatwasunusual 6y ago
  > I suppose when talking about PLs it's proportional to amount of working code in the wild. It comes down to the number of people that knows, or shows interest in, any given programming language. You are right that you might need to diverge from your language of choice at one point, even rewrite your whole application (which is scary enough), but you should do that at a point where a different language is "at top", or at least trending towards "the top." Perl is trending downwards in all statistics,[1][2][3] except maybe statistics that has to do with salaries, because it's hard to find people who can do the job. This is not a bashing of Perl itself: I love Perl, but I also see where it's failing, which is why I make use of several different programming languages to get a job done, if necessary. At the end of the day, Perl is just another tool in the toolbox, and as a boss you need to employ people that are familiar with the most popular (not necessarily the best, sadly) tools to get the job done. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202020-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F05zrn https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202... [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...
iso1210 6y ago
And I'm sure some companies spent money rewriting perfectly functioning perl code into something like ruby.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  Or, in my experience, node. (Although it wasn't "perfectly functioning" Perl code but whilst it was an abhorrent mess internally, the actual problems were largely caused by the database parts - awful schema, bad server setups, godawful queries from an insane home-grown ORM, etc., which could all have been fixed in a couple of months.)
  - iso1210 6y ago
    Node at least is sexy, and I suspect will continue with large numbers of people writing it. Ruby however seems to be as esoteric as perl - its not js or python or java in ubiquity, it's not loved like rust and go, it doesn't have the longevity of perl, c and bash. Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs. Ruby on the other hand is a treadmill language. Code written in 2005 (when rails came out and it was the new hotness) wasn't runnable a mere 10 years later in 2015. I have processes that have longer runtime!* Time will tell how long Ruby 2 lasts, but I'd wager that perl 5 lasts longer that ruby 2. I'm interested in stable languages that just work for most of the things I write -- I want something to perform a task and carry on doing it with minimal effort for the next decade or two. I'm not interested in perl 6 or 7 because its a new language, it's competing in a crowded sphere other more recent languages. Perl5's value is its constantness and ubiquity. * hyperbole
    - jjav 6y ago
      > Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs. One of my CLI tools that lives in $HOME/bin on every machine I touch, is perl code I wrote in 1990. Haven't changed it once since then, just keep copying it everywhere.

dspillett 6y ago

> Long term? Probably not. If companies are sensible and have learned from past issues, yes. But I live in the real world, so no! Reference: the COBOL programmers pulled out of retirement en-mass in the late 90s to perform Y2K audits/fixes. > to maintain your product. Often with Perl it isn't the end product that is the issue, that is more likely to have been ported to some other language/framework, but instead all that Perl is managing IT and project infrastructure.

thatwasunusual 6y ago
>> Long term? Probably not. > If companies are sensible and have learned from past issues, yes. But I live in the real world, so no! In my world, more and more companies learns from past issues/failures. They also live in the same world as you do, which sees a decline in both number of Perl programmers and a decline in general usage of the language itself.[1][2][3] > Reference: the COBOL programmers pulled out of retirement en-mass in the late 90s to perform Y2K audits/fixes. That was 20 years ago. Plus, it's not a good thing that people are "pulled out of retirement" to fix things. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202020-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F05zrn https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202... [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...
- edoceo 6y ago
  > In my world, more and more companies learns from past issues/failures. Welcome to earth! We don't do it that way here.
  - thatwasunusual 6y ago
    Not Perl's - or any other programming language's - problem if a company doesn't know how to do their stuff.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > That was 20 years ago. Correct. Longer if you count people in the 80s working to fix affected code that caused problems for 20-to-25 year term financial arrangements and so forth. I'm not saying it was recent, just this is a good example and one I don't think many have sufficiently learned from (too many think it was a fuss over nothing, when really it was a fuss to make sure it was nothing). > Plus, it's not a good thing that people are "pulled out of retirement" to fix things. I make no claim that it is a good thing. Just that it happened, has happened far more than that one big event, and similar things will continue to happen at different scales. I could (but for commercial and legal reasons, shouldn't and won't) name specific examples of companies relying on systems written in elderly languages/frameworks, apparently locked to old versions of software components or hardware that they just hope won't break before they finally get budget for something new (which isn't likely to happen for a reasonable definition of "soon" under the circumstances) because finding the right people to fix it would be somewhere between gloriously expensive and actually impossible.

brokenkebab 6y ago

Yes, but in the long term everything will break, no matter what language one uses. The question is how long is long? I suppose when talking about PLs it's proportional to amount of working code in the wild.

thatwasunusual 6y ago
> I suppose when talking about PLs it's proportional to amount of working code in the wild. It comes down to the number of people that knows, or shows interest in, any given programming language. You are right that you might need to diverge from your language of choice at one point, even rewrite your whole application (which is scary enough), but you should do that at a point where a different language is "at top", or at least trending towards "the top." Perl is trending downwards in all statistics,[1][2][3] except maybe statistics that has to do with salaries, because it's hard to find people who can do the job. This is not a bashing of Perl itself: I love Perl, but I also see where it's failing, which is why I make use of several different programming languages to get a job done, if necessary. At the end of the day, Perl is just another tool in the toolbox, and as a boss you need to employ people that are familiar with the most popular (not necessarily the best, sadly) tools to get the job done. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202020-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F05zrn https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-01%202... [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop...

iso1210 6y ago

And I'm sure some companies spent money rewriting perfectly functioning perl code into something like ruby.

zimpenfish 6y ago
Or, in my experience, node. (Although it wasn't "perfectly functioning" Perl code but whilst it was an abhorrent mess internally, the actual problems were largely caused by the database parts - awful schema, bad server setups, godawful queries from an insane home-grown ORM, etc., which could all have been fixed in a couple of months.)
- iso1210 6y ago
  Node at least is sexy, and I suspect will continue with large numbers of people writing it. Ruby however seems to be as esoteric as perl - its not js or python or java in ubiquity, it's not loved like rust and go, it doesn't have the longevity of perl, c and bash. Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs. Ruby on the other hand is a treadmill language. Code written in 2005 (when rails came out and it was the new hotness) wasn't runnable a mere 10 years later in 2015. I have processes that have longer runtime!* Time will tell how long Ruby 2 lasts, but I'd wager that perl 5 lasts longer that ruby 2. I'm interested in stable languages that just work for most of the things I write -- I want something to perform a task and carry on doing it with minimal effort for the next decade or two. I'm not interested in perl 6 or 7 because its a new language, it's competing in a crowded sphere other more recent languages. Perl5's value is its constantness and ubiquity. * hyperbole
  - jjav 6y ago
    > Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs. One of my CLI tools that lives in $HOME/bin on every machine I touch, is perl code I wrote in 1990. Haven't changed it once since then, just keep copying it everywhere.