Hacker News Reader

Comment by eliben | Hacker News Reader

Perl is on the sure way to become the COBOL of the scripting world. I'm saying this as one who invested years into learning and applying Perl everywhere I could. But seriously, it's a done deal now. Move on.

Yes, there are still companies with large Perl code-bases. Large Perl code-bases need a lot of maintenance (sigh). So Perl programmers will be in some demand for a few years at the least. Hence the analogy to COBOL.

View on HN

Wouldn't COBOL be classic scripting - one funny thing at BT we had a lifer COBOL guy (20 years plus on mainframes) join our perl team - he found the transition hard "where are the Divisions" was one quote from him

When was the last time a COBOL project has generated as much buzz as Perl's Mojolicious has just yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8095574

That's a little unfair. COBOL just isn't well suited to problems solved by a new web framework. Batch processing of financial data is important, but it ain't likely to generate buzz.

As opposed to Perl, which was designed as a web framework language?

Point taken, but Perl has a (very) long history of being the glue the holds websites (and everything else) together. I think perl files in cgi-bin is the first time I ever connected a database to a web page.

COBOL has an even longer history processing business and financial data. Perhaps COBOL is the secret sauce that hedge funds use for high frequency trading?

Maybe you just weren't a good enough programmer for Perl?

That's entirely possible. Perl's trajectory in the past 7-8 years is, after all, consistent with all the stars staying and all the bad programmers leaving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com