> Dan, would you mind describing your experiences at Verio and Micron?
> I'd be very interested to hear about organizations that have developed
> solid internal support for Perl environments (or other open source
> platforms), or where there is executive-level confidence in the
> reliability of these platforms.
I can dig for more on the Micron bit; my brother-in-law works there as an
engineer, and regularly describes their development work as consisting of
some 90% Perl.
At Verio, we develop and sell several web hosting platforms. Our shared
hosting plans (a.k.a. Hiway) use Perl entirely for the application layer,
including branding systems, billing management, and so on. A fairly
substantial code base. Another product, our VPS (Virtual Private Server,
first in the industry (TM)) on FreeBSD and Solaris, uses Perl for all
database management tools, account management and provisioning, and lots
of interface development. More recently a new product at Verio uses Perl,
mod_perl, XML::LibXML/XSLT in a large reseller branding system. Verio is
very much a FreeBSD+Perl shop.
I can add one to the list; Norwest Mortgage, now a large part of Wells
Fargo. The IT division there has gigantic data warehouses (many, many
terrabytes) and production Sybase systems that are entirely Perl-driven;
everything from transport layers to web-delivery of data for the mortgage
branches, to reports, to sysadmin.
That's just a few companies that I know of. In essense, many (most?) very
large companies use Perl (4.x-5.6.1) in "business-critical" application
environments, and have been doing so for quite some time on Solaris (some
SunOS, I'm sure), Irix, AIX, and more recently FreeBSD. I do not, and have
never, viewed publicity as a problem for Perl When and Where it Counts.
Many companies that aren't "hip to the beat of a new paradigm" continue to
use it, and are wise to its stability within their environments. Granted,
this is and will continue to become a larger issue as stupid people
convince smart people that system upgrades also mean language upgrades,
despite being uncomfortable with those changes. It is the role of Perl
folks, IMO, to nullify the supposed benefits of New Paradigms that
continue to be best met with practical extraction. Perl 5.6 and 6.0 will
continue to give most (I said most) engineers the logic to make those
arguments.
Dan
