in reply to Perl in the Enterprise

Scott7477:

Good question. A couple of years ago, I had to create a set of data feed translators between a mainframe and an application on a Windows 2000 box. Since I had only a couple of days to do it in, I whipped it up in Perl. When we attempted to roll it out into production, management delayed the rollout and forced us to rewrite the app in one of the "approved" languages.

Then we were bought out by a larger corporation, and while exploring the corporate website, I found that Perl is on the Proscribed technologies list, along with the reason it's prohibited. I don't remember the exact reason, but the gist of it was that Perl is thought of as a Web application language, and that it's insecure.

The funny thing: It's only prohibited on certain platforms. For the Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX platforms it's OK. (I wish my project was deployed on one of those, instead of W2K.)

--roboticus

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Re^2: Perl in the Enterprise
by apotheon (Deacon) on May 20, 2006 at 18:03 UTC

    While Java and .NET certainly have their uses, and I wouldn't recommend a company making a list of "proscribed technologies" that included Java and .NET, I rather suspect that a company that included Java and .NET in such a list would end up with better software on average than a company that listed Perl and Lisp, or Perl and Python, or something like that, as "proscribed technologies".

    print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
    		 - apotheon
    CopyWrite Chad Perrin

[reply]
      I totally agree. I'm pretty much a "what language is going to do the job best for me" type of guy. That's why the latest project is a mixture of C++, C# and VB. I needed to do some process control, so I used VB (a previous employee had a nice set of subroutines to steal, so I needed to add only a little code). For the I/O screens, I used C#. Then I had some *massive* data manipulation and reformatting. I used C++ for that.

      (I originally wrote 'em in Perl. It took very little time to write, and they ran pretty fast. Then when I had to code 'em up again, I tried C#, but quit when I found that C# sucks mightily for the types of data manipulation I was doing--too much typing to do simple byte manipulations, and I like pointers for some things. I finally finished in C++. It took longer to code than Perl (far longer, as I had no handy subroutine libraries). But I console myself in that it runs like a rocket! (2GB of data files in seven formats parsed, sorted, filtered and rewritten into 12 output feeds .... 90 seconds!)

      But if I could've used my original Perl version, I'd've had another 2.5 weeks to work on other tasks.... For the data manipulation I was doing, Perl was clearly better for 90% of it. (Maybe all ... but I'm not so sure about that. On my desktop it starts to suck when my data structures get up to 2GB of data. But that's likely due to my limited Perl skills.)

      --roboticus

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