laziness, impatience, and hubris | |
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This isn’t wikipedia. My reference is me. I was at Amazon when they decided Java was the way forward—because XML and Java was the future of all programming and coincidentally the first step to off-shoring—for all customer service code, 1999, and that rewriting *hundreds* of tools into Java made sense and doing new “experimental” stuff in Ruby was a good idea because Perl was a trainwreck of write only line noise. It was the same timeline Yahoo ditched Perl for PHP for its workaday stuff. Here is some perspective from the era: Beating the Averages. Java, Python, and, to a much lesser degree, Ruby hackers spent a lot of energy putting Perl down back then. The ugly secret of the world—from programming to politics—is FUD works really well. The specific genesis of Perl6 was exactly this atmosphere and growing distaste and backlash regarding Perl5. Punchline at Amazon is that particular tool suite in Java crashed and burned after 18 months of wasting time and $millions and getting something like 20% code complete compared to the Perl/C tools that already existed and had taken about the same amount of time to write. The Java was also so slow it was halfway unusable and most employees took to using the old tools—instead of stalling customers on the phone for the five or ten minutes it took a tool to run—despite there being zero training or encouragement. The whole thing ended up being redone. In Perl. I wasn’t there for that and have no idea how long it lasted. Off-shoring started soon after that. I left the department over the issue and direction. The only reason I know that part of the story is two dummies who don’t understand corporate espionage at all talked about it two seats away for a half hour on a Seattle City bus. In reply to Re^9: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
by Your Mother
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