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Comment by elnado | Hacker News Reader

oh that's actually really good to hear - my team has a lot of backend services in Perl (yeah..) that we're moving to Go :)

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Why would you rewrite already-working services written in an expressive and battle-tested language to a fad 1970s-style language?

It's like being in the late 90s and replacing your existing infrastructure with Java hype, except with a language somehow worse but justified with Rob Pike's pseudointellectual bullshit.

depending on technical debt in Perl code (which is quite easy to incur) it might make sense if you're still making changes to the project. also single-binary deployment is always nice, though in the world where docker exists not as big of a deal as it used to be a few years ago.

> single-binary deployment is always nice

Available since Fortran and not a Go only feature.

Haha fair argument. As someone pointed out - it's very easy to incur technical debt in Perl. It's a dynamic language with virtually non-existant dev tools and lacking open source community. I personally can't wait to go back to a static language for our backend. We're looking at NodeJS (of course...), JVM, and Go. Arguably you can fake typing in NodeJS with TypeScript, Flow, etc, but my team isn't too excited about JS for our backend, I personally have an allergic reaction to Java for backend and I really want a static language, so by process of elimination, Go wins.

Perl still has an active community, it's just not as big as some others. Perlmonks.org and /r/perl are fairly active.

(I'm sure you're aware of this, I just didn't want to leave the impression there's _no_ community.)

Fair, and good response. I was kind of just venting about my general dislike for Go there….

I do think Go has a decent niche for backend services similar to Erlang but with a much easier learning curve (and more available talent). Sounds like you're actually using the right tool for the right job.

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