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Comment by marghidanu | Hacker News Reader

I fully resonate with this article! For the last few years I've been trying to do the same thing and in the last 2 years I can say that we successfuly managed to create a similar thing using Perl. More than this we are developing all our web services with Mojolicious we are running them on top of Mesos using Docker. We use Module::Build for packaging the app and to be honest I find it more reliable than using any other tools. I'm gald to see that there's somone else who believes in Perl's abilities to deliver a modern application.

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In much the same way that PHP has a reputation for being "bad", Perl has a reputation (ill-deservedly!) for being line-noise, or obsolete.

I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day.

Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is itself a clone of Ruby's sinatra).

I think the fastest way to convince yourself that Perl is obsolete is to try to hire for good Perl programmers. It's a fine language if you treat it well, but it's going the way of COBOL.

Perl programmer here of 17 years. I'm happy to look into new projects.

I don't have nearly justinator's experience, about a year of heavy Perl use, but I would love to get back into it.

It's not _that_ hard to hire good Perl programmers. Maybe it depends on they scale you need to hire for, but I've been involved in the hiring process for a couple of Perl positions and I've seen lots of really strong candidates.

I disagree. It is not the flavor of the month, like other things. There are excellent people available, and not a dwindling number of them at that.

Module growth is strong, and accelerating.

Not quite the hallmarks of something going the way of COBOL.

Note also that Fortran is also in heavy use in various science fields. Rumors of its impending death have also been greatly exaggerated.

I'm not really sure why you can't hire a Ruby or Python programmer, if they are open minded about it, and train them. There's not that much actually different, compared to some other languages. In fact, I think the only major things you would need to teach them that they couldn't easily find from the docs would be about how context works, and references (references to a lesser degree, just make sure they get how they are used in complex data structures).

> I'm not really sure why you can't hire a Ruby or Python programmer

Yeah, sure, hire a Ruby/Python programmer ... and try to trick them about the language they're going to be using by being vague about it in the job posting and initial conversations until they got really interested?

Been there, done that. It was a stopgap measure that sort of worked and it wasn't that much fun.

No, just advertise appropriately. Some people don't apply because they don't want to use the language, others don't apply because they expect you to require skill in that specific language. Something along the lines of "Knowledge of Perl or equivalent dynamic language strongly suggested."

> I think the fastest way to convince yourself that Perl is obsolete is to try to hire for good Perl programmers.

Hire for good programmers, and they'll be good Perl programmers if they need to be.

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