4 ms·

Are Perl programmers generally more morally flexible than others?

DonHopkins 5y ago
No, I mean that BooKing.com is morally flexible enough to hire anyone who claims they are willing to program in Perl, because it's so damned hard to find good Perl programmers who don't know any other languages they enjoy programming in more, and can't find better jobs than programming in Perl. If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl. And the moral flexibility of that company (not the programmers) also expresses itself through those "dark UX patterns" that BooKing.com is so famous for. (Although they should probably talk to somebody about their domain name: I always assumed BooKing.com was an anti-royalist web site. ;) )
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  > If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl. Yes, but then they'd get results in Javascript, which has it's own security nightmares (like npm's recent third-party-code-injection incident.) Given their business most likely involves the need to quickly parse huge amount of text files (think: hotel booking information, SABRE info, ...), Perl might just be the right tool for the job. I don't know about booking.com's hiring platform, but in my subjective experience, Perl people tend to be more professional and more careful than JS folks.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Sure, people make mistakes and create bugs and security holes in every language. And some languages like PHP attract newbies who know no other language. And other languages like Perl 5 are so syntactically complex that they repel newbies. But how many schools and classes and youtube videos teach JavaScript? And how many teach Perl? The fact that there are a lot of bad JavaScript programmers isn't a symptom of JavaScript programmers being bad. It's a symptom of there being a lot of JavaScript programmers. There are also a lot of really excellent JavaScript and TypeScript programmers, just not as many as bad ones. (But I bet there are more good JavaScript/TypeScript programmers than all Perl 5 programmers plus all Raku programmers (counting everyone who knows both twice), by far.) To make a gross understatement, TypeScript's evolution from JavaScript didn't take as long, went smoother, wasn't as incompatible, and was more interoperable, successful, and popular than Raku's evolution from Perl 5. Not to mention it's much easier for a JavaScript programmer to learn TypeScript, and to upgrade JavaScript code to TypeScript code, than moving from Perl 5 to Raku. (And I also bet BooKing.com isn't upgrading from Perl 5 to Raku any time soon.) There are more great JavaScript and TypeScript programmers available to hire than mediocre Perl 5 programmers, because Perl 5 is effectively a dead language, while JavaScript and TypeScript are both ubiquitous, thriving, widely taught languages. JavaScript shops (and also Python and C# and Java shops) actually have the option of not hiring the bad programmers and intelligence agency plants, and hiring lots of the good programmers. PS: BooKing.com could easily be confused with the evil "King Boo", Luigi's antagonistic arch-nemesis, and scheming ally of Bowser! Why doesn't Nintendo send them a cease and desist for acting so villainous, and seise their rightful domain in the name of King Boo? ;) https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo >King Boo is the leader of the Boos and ghosts, ruler of the Paranormal Dimension, the main antagonist of the Luigi's Mansion series, and the arch-nemesis of Luigi. He is also an ally of Bowser, who has aided him in his various schemes. He is more than capable of devising and enacting villainous plans by himself, including his capture and imprisonment of Mario. Although not the biggest Boo, King Boo has abilities that far surpass that of the average ghost; he wields a number of impressive magical abilities, including the ability to materialize objects. King Boo's magical power is directly proportional to the number of Boos in his vicinity.
- b20000 5y ago
  javascript implies well educated? so much LOL here. maybe perl programmers are happy with perl and have no interest in learning yet another programming language.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    While there are many Javascript "developers" that don't deserve that title, there are much much more actually-good JS developers than actually-good Perl developers, not to mention the willingness to program Javascript than Perl.
    - b20000 5y ago
      i might be able to accept that there are more javascript developers than perl developers. this then implies there are more good javascript developers, but only if javascript does not attract more wannabe developers. and i think that might be the issue.
      - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
        Why gatekeep being a developer?
      - DonHopkins 5y ago
        No, seriously, there is absolutely no comparison between the number of Perl 5 and JavaScript developers. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Most popular technologies: JavaScript: 67.7% for all devs, 69.7% for pro devs): First place! Perl: 3.1% for all devs, 3.3% with pro devs: Third from last place, only a wee bit more popular than Haskel and Julia! And you can take a guess at how many jobs for Haskel and Julia programmers there are. And it's not like good Perl 5 programmers are dropping dead, or being hit by busses: They're simply moving on to better, more popular, well supported, widely taught, more modern, higher paying, more pleasurable languages! Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is. Any decent professional programmer (ESPECIALLY web developers) should have no trouble picking up and applying new languages, and regularly using multiple languages together at the same time every day. The world is not partitions into mono-linguistic silos, and no one language is good for everything. If those monolinguistic Perl 5 developers b20000 speaks of who refuse to use any other languages are the only ones left for BooKing.com to hire, then it's no wonder they have enormous security holes and terrible buggy hard-to-maintain code. https://www.fastcompany.com/3026446/the-fall-of-perl-the-webs-most-promising-language https://www.fastcompany.com/3026446/the-fall-of-perl-the-web...
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I don’t see how being flexible on hiring to meet the market is being morally flexible. There’s nothing immoral about it that I can see.
ManuelKiessling 5y ago
They grep what they can.

No, I mean that BooKing.com is morally flexible enough to hire anyone who claims they are willing to program in Perl, because it's so damned hard to find good Perl programmers who don't know any other languages they enjoy programming in more, and can't find better jobs than programming in Perl. If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl. And the moral flexibility of that company (not the programmers) also expresses itself through those "dark UX patterns" that BooKing.com is so famous for. (Although they should probably talk to somebody about their domain name: I always assumed BooKing.com was an anti-royalist web site. ;) )

DocTomoe 5y ago
> If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl. Yes, but then they'd get results in Javascript, which has it's own security nightmares (like npm's recent third-party-code-injection incident.) Given their business most likely involves the need to quickly parse huge amount of text files (think: hotel booking information, SABRE info, ...), Perl might just be the right tool for the job. I don't know about booking.com's hiring platform, but in my subjective experience, Perl people tend to be more professional and more careful than JS folks.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Sure, people make mistakes and create bugs and security holes in every language. And some languages like PHP attract newbies who know no other language. And other languages like Perl 5 are so syntactically complex that they repel newbies. But how many schools and classes and youtube videos teach JavaScript? And how many teach Perl? The fact that there are a lot of bad JavaScript programmers isn't a symptom of JavaScript programmers being bad. It's a symptom of there being a lot of JavaScript programmers. There are also a lot of really excellent JavaScript and TypeScript programmers, just not as many as bad ones. (But I bet there are more good JavaScript/TypeScript programmers than all Perl 5 programmers plus all Raku programmers (counting everyone who knows both twice), by far.) To make a gross understatement, TypeScript's evolution from JavaScript didn't take as long, went smoother, wasn't as incompatible, and was more interoperable, successful, and popular than Raku's evolution from Perl 5. Not to mention it's much easier for a JavaScript programmer to learn TypeScript, and to upgrade JavaScript code to TypeScript code, than moving from Perl 5 to Raku. (And I also bet BooKing.com isn't upgrading from Perl 5 to Raku any time soon.) There are more great JavaScript and TypeScript programmers available to hire than mediocre Perl 5 programmers, because Perl 5 is effectively a dead language, while JavaScript and TypeScript are both ubiquitous, thriving, widely taught languages. JavaScript shops (and also Python and C# and Java shops) actually have the option of not hiring the bad programmers and intelligence agency plants, and hiring lots of the good programmers. PS: BooKing.com could easily be confused with the evil "King Boo", Luigi's antagonistic arch-nemesis, and scheming ally of Bowser! Why doesn't Nintendo send them a cease and desist for acting so villainous, and seise their rightful domain in the name of King Boo? ;) https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo >King Boo is the leader of the Boos and ghosts, ruler of the Paranormal Dimension, the main antagonist of the Luigi's Mansion series, and the arch-nemesis of Luigi. He is also an ally of Bowser, who has aided him in his various schemes. He is more than capable of devising and enacting villainous plans by himself, including his capture and imprisonment of Mario. Although not the biggest Boo, King Boo has abilities that far surpass that of the average ghost; he wields a number of impressive magical abilities, including the ability to materialize objects. King Boo's magical power is directly proportional to the number of Boos in his vicinity.
b20000 5y ago
javascript implies well educated? so much LOL here. maybe perl programmers are happy with perl and have no interest in learning yet another programming language.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  While there are many Javascript "developers" that don't deserve that title, there are much much more actually-good JS developers than actually-good Perl developers, not to mention the willingness to program Javascript than Perl.
  - b20000 5y ago
    i might be able to accept that there are more javascript developers than perl developers. this then implies there are more good javascript developers, but only if javascript does not attract more wannabe developers. and i think that might be the issue.
    - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
      Why gatekeep being a developer?
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      No, seriously, there is absolutely no comparison between the number of Perl 5 and JavaScript developers. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Most popular technologies: JavaScript: 67.7% for all devs, 69.7% for pro devs): First place! Perl: 3.1% for all devs, 3.3% with pro devs: Third from last place, only a wee bit more popular than Haskel and Julia! And you can take a guess at how many jobs for Haskel and Julia programmers there are. And it's not like good Perl 5 programmers are dropping dead, or being hit by busses: They're simply moving on to better, more popular, well supported, widely taught, more modern, higher paying, more pleasurable languages! Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is. Any decent professional programmer (ESPECIALLY web developers) should have no trouble picking up and applying new languages, and regularly using multiple languages together at the same time every day. The world is not partitions into mono-linguistic silos, and no one language is good for everything. If those monolinguistic Perl 5 developers b20000 speaks of who refuse to use any other languages are the only ones left for BooKing.com to hire, then it's no wonder they have enormous security holes and terrible buggy hard-to-maintain code. https://www.fastcompany.com/3026446/the-fall-of-perl-the-webs-most-promising-language https://www.fastcompany.com/3026446/the-fall-of-perl-the-web...
sokoloff 5y ago
I don’t see how being flexible on hiring to meet the market is being morally flexible. There’s nothing immoral about it that I can see.

ManuelKiessling 5y ago

They grep what they can.