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Comment by stevelaz | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's good to see perl 'still' being used by someone that big. I didn't believe you to begin with but to quote the wikipedia article: "The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux."

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Slashdot too, if I could download knowledge into my brain matrix style, perl would be the first thing.

http://slashcode.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=slashc...

Don't you know the golden rule of Perl. Firstly its not replaceable, secondly anything that tries to replace it largely looks and feels like it.

Nonsense. That quote comes from Common Lisp, it was just hopelessly bastardized by some perl people (like everything else in that language :P).

There is massive evidence that disagrees with you, for example look at Ruby and Perl 6.

Just because a principle applied to something first does it now mean it should now never apply to anything ever.

Booking.com is a large online travel agency which is pretty popular in Europe. From a recent job description:

Due to our continuing growth we are in search of Perl Developers for our headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Memcache, JavaScript, Git, Linux & more. We do agile software development based on scrum.

I guess we can call that the 90's heritage of Booking.com. Naturally we can't use the same explanation for DDG, which launched less than half a decade ago.

Last I heard the New York Times was 'still' running Perl as well, and they're pretty big...

Adding to the list of Perl shops: TicketMaster, Rent.com, Campus Explorer, and ZipRecruiter (where I work).

Perl's strength is manipulating text. Search engines manipulate text...

Precisely why I, too, believe Perl was chosen.

Craigslist would be another Perl shop. And Media Temple.

A lot of Amazon.com is still Perl...

Are you sure about that? They had a big rewrite some years back and got rid of much of it.

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