Re: In Defense of Perl

[steve]

Features and facts about Perl that may help your discussion:

• Perl 5.10 was released December 18, 2007 - perhaps not as antiquated as it is made out to be
• Perl is included by default in both Linux and MacOSX distributions which implies both stability and widespread use
• Perl ports are available for many other operating systems
• 18,000 modules available on CPAN (and many of them are very well written, tested, and maintained)
• Ability to include and use C/C++ code and XS modules
• Free for business/enterprise use (compare ColdFusion Pricing)
• More than 20 years of development
• Great defect density (see report)
• Passes the homeland security test (see results)
• ModPerl allows for Apache integration
• Apparently you already have a Perl codebase

Perhaps you could also benefit from a discussion with the manager in question and identify his/her concerns and needs. In the end he/she may just not like Perl, and there may be nothing that you can do to change that (in which case you can either learn ColdFusion or find another source of employment). If this manager has real concerns that can be addressed you may be able to explain how Perl can resolve these concerns.

[Your Mother]

I don't know anything about the methodologies etc but I liked the quote so-

"Of the LAMP stack, Perl had the best defect density well passed standard deviation and better than the average," Chelf said.

Perl had a defect density of only 0.186. In comparison Python had a defect density of 0.372 and PHP was actually above both the baseline and LAMP averages at 0.474.

Other popular projects included in the 32 projects that made up the baseline are: Firefox (0.355), Gaim (0.352), Gnome (0.458), GCC (0.202) and Samba (0.695), among others.

Now I can say Python is twice as buggy as Perl. And I know it's true because I read it on the Interwebs.