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>> 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 mor

>> 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.

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.