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Comment by myaccountonhn | Hacker News Reader

I've been toying with Perl+CGI-scripts lately and find its super productive with the benefit that I can do serverless without the lock-in.

I don't think the software engineering field is particularly rational and mostly follows trends or what looks good or familiar. We have a proclivity to assume that anything old is legacy. Most developer have never studied any CS history and are quite young, so they're bound to reinvent the wheel as well.

I think its fine to use older technology if its the right fit for the problem, and since the tech is battle-tested, you can read up as to why it went out-of-fashion, and as a result can minimize the risks with using it. It's "predictably disappointing".

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> Most developer have never studied any CS history and are quite young

Even the ones who studied it still fall into the trap of novelty for novelty sake. I'm guilty of that as well 20+ years ago at the start of my career, I believe it's one of those wisdom rites of passage someone needs to go through to value the lesson.

Boring old tech that works is pretty good, if it's not unmaintained, gets updates while keeping a stable core, has an ecosystem of good libraries and documentation, I'll always choose it over some new fangled thing from the past 2-5 years.

You need to feel the pain of depending on something that is taken away, or dies a slow but surely death, or creates massive headaches to upgrade, to value the stability of boring old tech.

I feel it's a cycle bound to be repeated by each generation.

I'm old enough to have been using Perl with CGI in the waning years of the old millennium. I loved it then, but it's not just hype cycles that caused people to move on to different solutions: Modern stuff is better in a bunch of very real ways.

I found that with CGI::Application, and similar Perl modules you get the facilities of the modern stuff, as well as the portability and simplicity of a simple index.cgi script.

Two things I think Perl always had a good reputation for was CPAN, providing interfaces to "everything", and a high degree of testing. I love that golang and rust both emphasize testing in modules/crates/packages. Writing perl CGI scripts I always had test-cases for the whole lifecycle, and that's something that isn't so common these days writing handlers in other languages.

if you like perl+CGI, then i suggest you take a look at https://harcstack.org

I love this

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