I was wondering if anyone else has run into the kind of negative feedback
recently that I have seen following the news of a major rewrite of Perl. I
am with a systems integrator. I work primarily with VLDB -- designing and
building CRM/ERM systems. I spoke a few times at the annual Perl conference
about how to get Perl accepted into large corporate IT shops.
In the last two weeks two clients, whom I had managed to convince to use
Perl more broadly throughout their companies in the last few years, each
independently sent me some frantic email asking me to describe whether the
rewrite was a good or bad thing. One of the two clients, a large bank, is
considering moving away from Perl out of fear of lack of stability and
problems with backward compatibility. Large IT shops like to move in very
small increments generally.
I know that this kind of reactionary corporate IT response is not unusual
with major commercial software upgrades, but it seems more pronounced here
because Perl is open source. In other words, a lot of large clients are
already a bit apprehensive about Perl, but based on it's demonstrated
usefulness have begun to use it far more widely throughout their
organizations. However, Perl still maintains a funny status within a lot of
companies. It's almost as though Perl seems a necessary evil to a lot of
corporate IT managers -- who I think still take the attitude that they will
allow limited use of Perl until they get a chance to replace that code with
something better and quickly so. It happily turns out that there usually
isn't anything better, but the attitude still prevails. I also got a few
stories about problems between upgrading from Perl 4 to Perl 5, which a
number of people claim wasn't very smooth, although the issues I saw in
practice were very small.
I don't have any particular recommendations at this time, but the spin
placed on the public statements about Perl 6 is critical. I was surprised
to get such a direct and worried response.
Bob Doucette
Lead Software Engineer
iXL - Enterprise Relationship Management Practice Group
7 Audubon Road
Wakefield, Massachusetts 01880
Main: 781-246-9024
Direct: 781-716-1015
Fax: 781-246-1958
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