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Comment by hellweaver666 | Hacker News Reader

Also, if it works for them, it may not be financially viable to rewrite all of their code. For example, I work for a large company that uses Perl for all the backend stuff on our website. If we were to change to a more "modern" stack, we would have to stop and focus on that for a period of time instead of pushing the company forward and improving the customer experience etc.

In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy but it gets the job done. Probably a similar situation at Linode.

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> In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy > but it gets the job done.

What is not cool about Perl? You don't need to transition to a new framework outside of Perl. You can upgrade your backend by investing your time in rewriting the Perl code to newer standards.

    > What is not cool about Perl?

Almost everything is not cool about Perl. Perl felt crufty and ancient even when I was learning it fifteen years ago. It's only gotten weirder, cruftier, and more ancient since then.

I dunno, it's been nearly as long since I learned Perl (or used it much) but the stuff I've seen out of the "modern Perl" movement (http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html) looks a lot cleaner and more, well, modern than the Perl I used to live with. You can still write "crufty and ancient" Perl, in other words, but you don't have to.

It's hard to find good Perl developers and even harder to run multi-language libraries for the same online portal (ie same site, domain, database, hosting environment: hardware, OSs....and so on).

I disagree. First, it's hard to find good developers, period. S

econd, in general, good developers are hard to find by design (e.g., to avoid recruiters, but also because they are most tof the time already doing interesting work).

Lastly, yes, it's hard to find good Perl programmers to do boring work, under boring conditions, at a boring wage. But then that's true of all good developers. Try to find a Rails programmer to remediate crappy code (I've tried).

You're missing my point, PHP developers that know how to build websites are available ten to the dozen. But Perl most of the Perl developers we've tried to recruit over the last 18 months are either completely clueless at writing RESTful APIs or just terrible developers (sometimes even both).

We've had far more success at hiring good PHP developers and teaching them Perl then we have had at finding the Perl developers that can write web technologies.

But this might just be a facet of our location (a suburb that's more than an hour away from any city), so all the developers of "niche" languages (such as Perl has sadly become) tend to get drawn to the city and higher wages. Where as those who are still good developers but not as money driven tend to pick the more popular languages because they'll pick the work in the area they want to work. (that's probably an unfair generalization statement, but it's true for the local area where I live).

Very cool! Build vs. buy, you're building, everyone wins (plus you're a great employer for training your devs).

What's your product or service? Now Perl programmers are now seeking -you- out :)

And I'm sure you already know about the YAPC job fair: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/job-fair.html

Thanks for the YAPC link. We're UK based though, so quite a way away from Texas. :(

We do online games (amongst other things). Though I don't want to go into too many details as I try to keep a degree of anonymity online.

> What is not cool about Perl?

Perl is my first interpreted language. It has a very special place in my heart, even if it was awkward at first to get used to it coming from a C background. Perl will always be a cool kid.

I think it's interesting when people tie sentiment to coding choices. As previously stated, I could never wrap my head around the horrid syntax and the feeling that if you didn't know it from the beginning it was going to be a long, hard trek in doing so.

As for 'cool' I'm not so sure. Perl will be a niche sandbox for quite a while, but most run-ins with Perl (as of late) have been trying to remove it for something else. I think choosing a more accepted language has legs for a variety of reasons including code portability and long-term maintainability, both stemming from the fact that if there's only one guy maintaining all of the Perl code then that's a very-bad-thing.

But, that's just me. To wax nostalgic on Perl and use that as a basis for use-case seems, at least somewhat, reckless.

Perl was Ruby before Ruby was around to be the ugly cool kid.

I think most of the time it's never got anything to do with financial considerations, it's more just does anyone feel strongly enough about it to rewrite it in a fit of pique/on the sly/in a slow month and then on top of that have the power/influence/charm to push it through. No manager will ever say 'this non-essential system needs re-writing in a modern way'.

Rewrites where you're already intimate with the code base don't take that long for non-core stuff. I assume it's the web interface that's written in CF (which you can see from viewing the source in their signup and login pages). I guess you could argue it's core to their conversion process, but I mean their core skills are servers and their maintenance rather than web development so they probably actually haven't spent that many man hours on it.

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