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Comment by notdonspaulding | Hacker News Reader

The wheels of technological change in the Telecom space turn very, VERY slowly.

Not upgrading equipment and configs for 10 years is nothing in the ISP world.

You'd be scarily surprised just how much telecommunications runs on Perl5 ranging around the ~150GB level.

I had my stint at an ISP that worked with around 40 state level and national orgs. I saw the underbelly of how things work, and its frankly scary.

Nothing wrong with Perl5 though.

There is when much of the code was "write once, read never". There's more than a a few dozen MB blobs of dense perl5 code that we had no clue what it actually did, and was told not to touch it, lest many things break.

I had to end up touching one of them, because of things breaking with that subsystem and the new ticketing system that was being implemented. It had the wonderful line

     database_user = root
     database_password = [current mysql root password]

Lest to say, I no longer work there.

Every time I write some crap code at work, someone on HN tells a story about such horrors that I no longer feel bad. Thanks for making my day better :).

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