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Greetings fellas. Please take a seat and prepare yourself for a long sad story.


A couple of years ago I had worked for a company in which we've been using perl as our main programming language. Back in those days Perl was used for web-frontend programming as well as for complex backend engines with tricky business-logic in it, and in general as a universal swiss-army knife.

Since then I've changed my employers thrice. And all the three were extremely negative to perl as a tool. And that's not even to mention the perl as a programming language.

Well, I must admit that I shared those views on perl as a programming language for distributed programming since I already met the beutiful elegancy of erlang for these kind of solutions, but! But I still been loving perl as a versatile tool for simplifying everyday developer's life. Perl comes with the base system in many distributions of linux, it has spreaded in many minds and became known to almost anybody -- well, I thought it was --and is therefore an ideal tool in its niche.

But now I faced with an interesting situation. In the company where I currently work, of about thirty IT people only one person from support team actually knows perl. Nobody from QA team, no single one developer. Yes, I find it rather strange, but it's still a fact.

Here we have a web service that is installed and working somewhere far away in amazon VPS instances. That's my job, I have done this service in erlang. And by the old habit I sketched a stack of tests for it in perl and gave it to the QA team. Everything is kosher enough, the test suite has minimal dependencies, it is well structured, have in-line documentation for perldoc as well as a small README file. It covers a lot of functionality to test and it is proven to work on different environments. I even spent a little time to ensure those QA guys can run and use the given test suite on their own localhosts.

Now guess what? The QA team rewrites it in python. They have a very little knowledge of python so their code looks like spagetti, and even worse - they cant cover the needed functionality because of lack of python competency, but they forced to do it because of everyone, starting from the management, is scared of perl. They don't even want to give it a try!

The perl is thought to stand in the line with PHP - a must-die language. Even worse - it constantly collocated with epythets like 'write-only', 'poor-designed', 'vulgar' and 'dirty'.

You know what? I'm about to give up.

Please tell me I'm just a deviation and you have changed employer recently and still working in perl tolerating company.


In reply to regarding intolerance to perl which I observe by fisher

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