Mark Mielke wrote:
> Then they go and market themselves well, even if they are NOT actually decent
> coders, or have any sort of background in coding at all, they throw "Perl"
> on their CV, and take up contracts to write code (usually CGI's).
>
> They write crap that works, barely, then they move on.
>
> A month later it all falls to pieces and management takes a look at what
> went wrong. They see all the crappy code written in perl and decide that
> perl is another JavaScript.
This sort of problem seems to be uniquely Perlish in nature. I don't
hear about projects giving ASP, Java or VBScript the same tarnished reputation
Perl can get.
Perhaps the incessant corporate marketing messages behind these other
technologies provides a touchstone to PHB's that these are "safe", and
if there are any problems with your project, they're with your incompetant
staff, not the corporate-sponsored technology.
Another spin I've seen is a variant of the "no one knows UNIX" antipattern:
A perl programmer comes in, writes something and leaves. (Could be
a pumpking or a newbie; doesn't matter.)
Looking for replacement bodies, they don't get many resumes; perhaps
they weed out the buzzword-compliant ones from the real ones, perhaps
they don't.
At the end of the day, the can't find any Perl bodies (or any good ones,
or any in their price range, etc.)
Ergo, Perl is unmaintainable because you can't hire any Perl people.
Just a new spin on the "no one knows UNIX, but we can get an NT guy here
in a second" story.
(As always, forget the facts, there's an InfoWorld/PCLeak survey that
says so *RIGHT*HERE*!)
> So perl's biggest problem (also it's biggest selling point) is that it
> attracts a great number of people that wouldn't (read: shouldn't) ever
> be able to program in the first place.
This problem is endemic, and it's not limited to Perl. I'm sure there
are really bad Java programs out there for the same reasons.
In a bizarre sort of way, this is actually something good about Perl.
Perl is a greater amplifier than many (most?) languages that precede
or follow it. In that respect, a brilliant Perl hacker can do more
in 1K lines of perl in a week than a brilliant C/C++/Java/etc. hacker
can do in 10K lines in a month.
The downside is that someone truly unskilled or self-taught without
any formal grounding can really foul things up with Perl much more
easily than anyone similarly unskilled in C/C++/Java/etc.
It's the old "with great power comes great responsibility" adage writ large.
-- Adam
