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Comment by andygrd | Hacker News Reader

I'd feel sorry for anyone who hacked booking.com, they'd end up trying to decipher several petabytes of email data saying basically, "stop sending me hotel offers in Outer Mongolia!"

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Worse still, they would have to read Perl code :)

So you're saying the encrypt their code?

Hilarious route to security, only Perl programmers can work it out and they won't be bought off

Nobody can read my perl code -- including me!

Revenge of the Reg/"(?>(?:(?>[^"\\]+)|\\.)*)"/ ex. The enbalm it in pyramids and put a camel in front.

I love Perl. But, if I were hired to squirrel away code that helped me spy on people, Perl would be one of my top choices. Lots of opportunity to hide the true purpose of the code with weird, little known side-effects, syntax, and so on. Perl doesn't have to be cryptic, but it can be.

Why would anyone build something like that in Perl? I could only see it being done “just because”. Wasn’t Perl specifically designed for the quickly code it once and not change it again case?

Perl was python before python was python, and booking.com is old.

On the server it was the predecessor to Node.js, back when the alternative was a C program :)

I thought the Netherlands was weird in that there is a large group of Perl programmers who never decided to move on. It is its own ecosystem

Its kind of like how Japan stayed on flip phones for forever and even bolted on smartphone features to their flip phones.

Perl was the best/fastest way to write web applications (think FastCGI, mod_perl) before PHP stole that crown in late 90s.

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