Re: Professional perl

[kirbyk]

There are a lot of people doing Perl professionally (many of whom post here.) There are some areas where Perl isn't well suited, like any language, but these are a lot rarer than most people think.

In some sense, the world of software development is a closed system, so that if a VP of Engineering somewhere chooses Java over Perl at startup, that's fewer jobs that I'm qualified for (and more that someone else is.) So, all of us have a vested interest in language evangelism. Due to certain market conditions in the 90s, there's a lot of Java programmers out there, and Perl definitely treads on their turf, so there's a real effort to dismiss it as a less serious language.

Which is nonsense. Of course everyone here knows that it's usually the best choice for development time (and, despite the myths, maintenance time as well.) And execution time might not match up to C, but Java? Why would people ever think Java is faster than Perl?

So, it's easier to write faster code in Perl, why wouldn't you take it seriously? But, as per above, I have a vested interest in believing this and having others believe it. Making language decisions based on 'buzz' is a terrible mistake for that reason. If it's solving your technical problems in a way that's a good use of your time, that's the correct language to use.

And the list of companies that rely on perl is practically a who's who of Internet technology companies, with names like Google and Yahoo and Amazon. How can anyone not take Perl seriously? What do they know, that their more successful competitors don't?

[tilly]

Correction. Google does not use a significant amount of Perl. They use Python instead, because they feel that it scales better for large teams.

And while it is true that Yahoo! uses Perl, they use everything somewhere.

But Amazon is a good example.