the current german computer magazine iX has a report about mobile.de having migrated silently from Perl to Java in the past two years. The essence of the report in short:

• mobile.de, germanys biggest online car buying/selling platform, has been bought by eBay some time ago.
• eBay moved the mobile.de headquarter from Hannover - AFAIR, to Berlin and many of the programmers didn't follow.
• eBay was left with a system of about 550.000 LOC Perl and about 400 replicating DB Servers. And insufficient knowledge about it. They decided to move to Java Step-by-Step.

• Now, after two years (which was the plan), they have achieved what they wanted, system being alegedly x times faster, taking x times less ressources etc. etc.

All in all, for a person who knows (e. g. me *g*), it is evident, that the problem was not so much Perl as technology, but management constraints. Nevertheless, for a Perl advocate this is Waterloo, as now every manager in Germany will point to this case and we will probably see more large scale projects dying.

Not because Perl is bad, but because you simply do not get enough people at reasonable cost that would master Perl for large-scale projects. Either they are incompetent, or the competent ones are bound elsewhere, or they are competent and available, but pure prima donnas and do not play well in teams, or ... ;-)

But that's another story.

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