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0 pointsweatherlite3y ago0 comments

Will take awhile for Ruby to reach that state (if at all), 15 years at least I'd say. The reality is many companies are built on Ruby and rewrites are hard. Stripe, Shopify, Github, Gitlab and the list goes on. Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.

But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact because I happen to think it's a gorgeous language but it is what it is. I guess I'll have to get used to Python/Node or maybe switch to low level which is an old and perhaps unrealistic old dream of mine.

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davorg3y ago

> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.

Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.

In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.

cutler3y ago

I think Perl lost to Ruby because of Rails. Whilst Perl had a couple of web frameworks - Catalyst, Mojolicious and Dancer - they never gained anywhere near the traction of Rails. I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks. Catalyst gained a little adoption at a few big companies but it was hobbled by dependence on mod_perl which had a much riskier memory mode for hosting companies than mod_php. Perl was also a bit late shedding its mod_perl legacy by which time Ruby had Rack and Python had WSGI. Despite the brilliant work of Miyagawa it was game over by the time PSGI and Plack appeared.

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flomo3y ago

Yeah, A lot of those early web apps were total spaghetti garbage hardcoded to a table layout, so if they survived most of them were rewritten from scratch. Of course perl programmers' tricky tendencies didn't help, but also say ASP and ColdFusion etc have similar reputation issues.

weatherliteOP3y ago

I am only aware of Booking.com that is to this day mostly Perl. Do u know of any specific names?

mirchibajji3y ago

Zoopla. It's been a couple of years I left, but I believe they still use Perl for the core business logic. There are wrappers/docker images built on top of them, but Perl is doing all the heavy lifting AFAIK.

IME, big older companies have Perl code chugging along, but not very visible. Part of this is also because there's the perception that it is hard to attract developers if the company mentions Perl any where in the job description.

darrenf3y ago

A significant part of Yahoo!'s European and Asian sites had huge Perl backends.

IMDb.

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