Why Corporates Hate Perl

There are a still large number of large companies who love Perl. I could probably work through to my retirement enhancing and extending systems that are written in Perl at many of the big banks in the City of London. There are, however, also many companies who are moving away from Perl for a number of reasons. Here’s one of the reasons that will be included in my talk.

I was talking to people from one such company last night. The Powers That Be at this company have announced that Perl is no longer their language of choice for web systems and that over time (probably a lot of time) systems will be rewritten in a combination of Java and PHP. Management have started to refer to Perl-based systems as “legacy” and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don’t want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies.

And so, in a matter of months, the technical managers at this company have created a business environment where Perl is seen as the cause of most of the problems with the current systems. It’s an impressive piece of social engineering.

It’s also, of course, completely unfair. I don’t deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard to maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn’t directly due to the code being written in Perl. It’s because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority which encouraged developers to think beyond getting their immediate task done. Many of these systems date back to this company’s first steps onto the internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. It’s not really a surprise that the systems don’t interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain.