We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl.
I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role.
I discover, Perl is powerful.
Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output).
Managers want to move away from Perl.
I want to move closer to Perl.
I remember as a young programmer, our client once asked us to produce tool to migrate an entire legacy version control system with something like 20 years of history to a different version control system. It first went to up to some UML drawing Java architect, he came up with a estimate to have it done in 3 months with a team of 2-3 people working full time. The client was like "Never mind, forget about it". A few weeks passed by and client had dropped their mind to migrate the history and opted to just have the latest files checked in. In a random discussion with my manager it got a mention. My manager asked to check if I can do it quickly. I remember I wrote a script over the weekend and had every thing done. It was in Perl.
The script then got passed around and lot of people migrated their repos.
Finally it reached the Java architect. He had a hard time believing something like a few thousand lines of functioning feature rich code could even be written over the weekend. We had a good talk about it.
Perl belongs to a very different culture of programming/programmers who care only about solving problems and getting things done. Its not exactly a language that blends well with corporate political goals.
1) Data Munging with Perl was a pretty good book for it
I now follow a simple law when setting up a data source: If I need attribute X from an item then I better have a way to find all items with attribute X in a hurry.
Can't every language do that well?
Instead, these firms get paid big money to do that on a regular basis for the same companies. Mind-blowing.
Its amazing how 5 very simple programs is easier to maintain code-wise and operations-wise than 1 big program sometimes.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/06/how_i_go...
Managers (wisely) know that a large important project isn't (shouldn't be) built by one super-star programmer who then decides to leave for greener pastures, but that it's read, often times more than its written, by a team of people. Readability > Writability.
And so Perl was destined to "fail" in the corporate world, at the expense of more boring languages like Java/C#.
Of course there's exceptions and I'm sure there's 2-3 companies still out there that run Perl exclusively, but ultimately, it's a "bearded-loner-sitting-in-the-corner" language.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Can you explain how Perl was destined to fail in the corporate world?
Readability, of ANY code, is more often than not determined by how good the author is at naming things and avoiding senseless repetition (which are both skill honed with experience), and much less by any given feature of the language itself.