Another Perl success story: The Swedish pension system | Hacker News Reader

Another Perl success story: The Swedish pension system

oreillynet.com

17 pointsnixy14 comments

Lately there seems to be much more Perl articles on the front page, is there any particular reason for that? Is Perl suddenly getting more attention for some reason?

Yeah, Google Wave and Microsoft Bing were both written in Perl 6.

I can't find any references that support this. Is it a joke?

Yes. But apparently not a very good one.

Well, now that Parrot is doing releases above 1.0, it seems plausible that Perl 6 might actually be a finished product one day. That was in serious doubt for years.

Since, for the most part, "Perl 6" = Parrot + Rakudo [1], the big moment (IMO) will be when Rakudo hits 1.0. There should be a serious spike in interest at that point.

Hopefully the Perl community will take advantage of that spike. For example, it would be cool to see mod_perl6/mod_parrot hit stable at around the same time. Maybe even along with some key modules recoded in Perl 6 too (for webapps, maybe CGI::Application?).

[1]: Yes, I realize Perl 6 is the spec, but my guess is that Parrot + Rakudo will be the canonical implementation.

Uh... that's from 07/06/2001.

It would be a nice to have a convention of adding a date on articles older than N years.

I propose a simple (from 2001) appended on to the title.

Or [2001]

Sorry, should have put the date in. The reason I posted it was because I thought people would find it interesting in the light of the recent Perl success stories published here.

Indeed. And the age shows. In the section "Perl Wins the Comparison", they explain Perl's advantages:

  Good database connectivity gave Perl the nod over C++, 
  and since Sandell and Johnson received project text files 
  in various formats, Perl's ability to parse text with 
  regular expressions was much better than COBOL or 
  Oracle's PL/SQL.

These aren't the comparisons that would be made today, though I am very proud of Perl, having beaten COBOL and PL/SQL in a regex contest!

I also enjoyed the time-travel qualities of the conclusion of that section:

  They wrote the Web applications in Jscript, and other 
  parts of the system in Visual Basic. Some functions were 
  written in PL/SQL so they could be accessible from other 
  languages using the system. "If we did the project again, 
  we would probably strive to make more of it in Perl," 
  Sandell concedes. But with so little time, they couldn't 
  ask team members to learn a new language.

JScript no longer exists, unless it's a misnomer for JavaScript. Is it considered best practice to use code rather than stored procedures? (The question is genuine -- I'm not a software developer.)

JScript is Microsoft's name for ECMAScript.

The good news is they are still relying (mostly) on Perl

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