Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video] | Hacker News Reader

Symbiosis of Docker and Perl [video]

codeandtalk.com

49 pointsszabgab13 comments

I like Perl, but I don't see why it would be any more "symbiotic" with Docker than any other language.

This is really just a talk on one approach to do microservices with Perl.

High-falutin' titles seem to sell better (as opposed to"Using Docker with Perl"), never mind that English doesn't seem to be his first language. The talk itself seems to be on the pragmatic side, though (unsurprisingly when it comes to Perl).

Although one could make a point that symbiosis often involves quite different organisms, and pairing one of the currently hyped buzzwords with the language that last was really popular when CGIs ruled the earth might come close to that.

I don't use Perl much these days, but 10 years ago I would have really benefited from containerization of Perl code. That said, Perl really does become rather unmanageable for any sizable project, and was probably best used as a light weight scripting language with a great regex engine. For that limited type of use case, https://perlbrew.pl is a very handy tool.

On a semi-related note about Perl and later technologies, I was somewhat surprised Perl didn't receive more of a second wind from the early Hadoop days with 'hadoop streaming'. It seems they would have complemented each other well.

(edit: added that last paragraph)

You might want to check out one of the companies that has a large codebase in perl. blekko managed to build a nosql database and a million-line search engine without much technical trouble.

Plague and Rabies : better together.

Well I don't want to be the one to say it but Perl is pretty much dead, it has been replaced by Python in the last 8years or so.

A common observation, but I'm not sure how true it is. Python has much more share on things like reddit and on the TIOBE rankings, but it too is dead. Nobody likes Python3 which broke backwards compatibility for Unicode and is significantly slower than 2.x. None of the plans to JIT it have taken off. It doesn't scale. Perl isn't really any better here, but Perl6 is a completely different language than Perl5 that fixes many pain points and if ever successfully optimized might end up being the one scripting language to rule them all ;) (it has a bumpy road though). TLDR: Python has a lot of share, but no real future. It's not dead, but a dead-end (same as Perl5 long-term, but for now it is surprisingly active and well supported). Lots of new projects are done in Perl5 btw. One I'm particularly excited about is TauStation (SciFi text MMORPG).

Microservices are rarely extraction or reporting ... seems like a horrible misuse of the language (CRUD).

> Microservices are rarely extraction or reporting

Perl is just Perl now, just as LISP is now just Lisp; Perl is not, if it ever was, the "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language", any more than Lisp is now "LISt Processing".

And if we're talking about the other version of the acronym, then Perl is ideal for webservices and related technologies. Listing rubbish is what a lot of the modern web seems all about.

That, and swiss army chainsaw.

I'm surprised people still think of Perl like this. You realize Perl is being used by major sites such as imdb, booking.com, and duckduckgo? Maybe try watching the video before making a critical comment.

I treat perl as "ruby, except faster and with non-castrated OO"

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