system being alegedly x times faster, taking x times less ressources etc. etc.

I guess they would have achieved the same overall effect migrating from perl to perl, i.e. refactoring for 2 years... which endeavour would probably have reduced that 550 kLOC, who knows - hard to tell not knowing what the perl code looked like.

So it is hard impossible to tell (and misleading doing so) how great the net benefit of porting to java has been in terms of performance and resources. The biggest benefit clearly is having a unified code base and a single programming language.

update: s/hard/impssible/

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

If you are only interested in the small pic...

The cost is another main issue, if not bigger. To build apps on a platform costs much more effort and time than to just build it.

Thanks for topping me up! That should get me through the next few months.

I take heart from the fact that the large website was originally written in Perl. And I'm kinda impressed that they managed to complete a Java project on time. I thought Java was supposed to prevent that sort of thing happening.

Just for fun. I suspect this is an underestimate and does not include the hardware upgrades that seem to come with Java. A lot of these "success stories" look like pork and Chinese firedrills when viewed from inside a company instead of from reading the PR releases.

my $full_time_devs = 20; # Guess
my $annual_work_hours = 1800; # Guess
my $hourly_us = 40; # *Total* guess
my $years = 2;

printf("\$%s\n",
       commify( $full_time_devs *
                $hourly_us *
                $annual_work_hours *
                $years
                )
      );

sub commify {
    my $text = reverse $_[0];
    $text =~ s/(\d\d\d)(?=\d)(?!\d*\.)/$1,/g;
    return scalar reverse $text;
}
__END__
$2,880,000
[download]

Thanks for your comments and insights. Just to clarify:

• I too don't think this means Perl is dying. Also this wasn't a PR news, but from a reporter of the magazine itself (neither eBay nor mobile.de wrote it).
• My first thought was also, that refactoring perl for two years would bring probably similar results BUT and this is what made me think: only if you get the right people.

And that is what my last paragraph was about. Most of the time, you don't get the right people for large-scale Perl projects.

Nevertheless - one big supporter of the annual German Perl Workshops is gone. Let's see if this gap can be filled in the future.