in reply to Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?

My team doesn't write any new projects in Perl, but we have plenty of legacy projects already written in Perl.

We write new projects mostly in Ruby.

I dislike Ruby's slow compile time, but much of what I spent the last 15 years learning in Perl transferred right over to Ruby.

Perl is pretty great, but Rails is just plain awesome. And simple. And yes, you can do all that stuff with Perl, too, but you'll be one-of-a-handful of people doing it.

Go with the flow. Damn I sound old.

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Re^2: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 26, 2013 at 21:27 UTC
    ...but you'll be one-of-a-handful of people doing it.

    And command the corresponding salary and job security. And "handful" is subjective. Indeed.com's Job Trends shows Ruby on the job boards as pretty stable, maybe even declining, and half the number of each of the three Ps; Ruby's "footprint" in the dev world has so far been mostly by way of hype. Perl, while the trend is down, is still ever so slightly on top of Python and PHP, by the way.

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      And command the corresponding salary and job security.

      Well, i can't say about the salary (i get the average what my other IT colleagues get), but yes, working on in house Perl projects certainly increases (my) job security.

      Code written and maintained by me runs on a lot of systems, from our central assembly line webserver (118000 lines of code and counting) to things like glue-code in our pay-per-page printer accounting, data syncronization across windows domains, a tool used by some to convert propritary VCard-files exported from old phones to CSV files, custom time syncronization code used on some assembly line systems to a windows service that restarts other frequently-crashing windows services on some too-expensive-to-replace non-updateable Windows XP boxes. And about 30 or so other small projects.

      Quite funny, i'm still a one-man-team. Job security is fine. Going on vacation knowing someone would be able to cover for me would be nice, too.

      You could get a lot of jobless Python guys around here who may be able to whip up a decent helloworld.py in a day or two. But all the Perl guys and girls i know have a good, secure job and not a single reason to join my company, it seems.

      Maybe the design of the Perl language, its flexibility and its community play a vital part. When the assembly line stops and the german high end automotive producer calls every few minutes to get an update, you want a quick fix solution. But when most developers in these parts either learn Python or Java or something like this and have years of university "experience" and practice on how to design, implement and test a "good, clean, extensible and reusable" solution, being the companies odd Perl hacker who can "CPAN-hack a solution" in a few minutes (it only has to be just about good enough to get things moving again long enough to satisfy the customer) has its benefits...
      "I know what i'm doing! Look, what could possibly go wrong? All i have to pull this lever like so, and then press this button here like ArghhhhhaaAaAAAaaagraaaAAaa!!!"
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      Ruby's "footprint" in the dev world has so far been mostly by way of hype.

      I admit my statement is purely opinion.

      I live and work in San Francisco these days. I go to Berkeley and other local schools to do recruiting, several times each year. We hire from other places like Harvard and Stanford.

      Those kids hardly even know what Perl is.

      Ask them about Rails, and they have all at least played around with it, and many have github accounts with some silly Rails app that they made for fun.

      I don't think hype is a bad thing, when it at least gives you a starting point to work from.

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Re^2: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?
by einhverfr (Friar) on Nov 27, 2013 at 14:49 UTC

    The little bit I have done in Ruby has been nice. On the other hand, I really dislike Rails, primarily because I write ERP/financial software and the Rails approach to databases is just plain wrong at least where data is critical and must be reusable.

    This being said..... I can't fault Ruby for having Rails, just like I can't fault Perl for having Matt's Scripting Archive ;-)

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      perl has rails too, its called Mojolicious
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