zlacker

I had an interesting experience starting a job at ZipRecruiter, and finding that up to that point (2022), most of their code had been written in Perl. Their CTO had just gotten fed up with Perl and decreed that from now on, all new projects should be written in Go. I was the first one on my team to write code in Go.

There were various greybeards who kept telling me that Perl was a perfectly fine language and was fast enough for most purposes. I didn't argue with them and just backed away slowly.

Regarding Perl as a language, it seemed fine in the 1990s as a slightly more advanced alternative to Unix shells. But for me, what made it a failure as a language is that in order to have an array of hashes, or a hash of arrays, you needed to use references. That may have been a nice hack to enable some things in the 1990s, but even in 2005 that sounds pretty primitive and outdated to me. Plus the reliance on using magical variables consisting of $ and every non-letter ASCII character for all kinds of random stuff, like $_ and $# and so on. That may have been cool in 1992, but it's not 1992 any more.

Overall, Perl was pretty neat for little scripts up to 20 lines, but a bad idea for building an entire company on (like ZipRecruiter.) That's more of an indictment of ZipRecruiter than Perl.