How and Why Perl is Used in a Corporate Environment
A Case Study
davorg: "important part of marketing is repetion"
The Scenario
- Platform and application development inside a specific business unit of a public company
- Business unit was set up by public company by acquiring (former) start-up company
- Other business units use Perl for system administration support or to supplement their development toolchain
The public company in question
- Part of the Standard and Poor’s 500 index
- listed on the NASDAQ
- 2008 core revenue: $936 million
- ~3000 employees, business unit using Perl as primary language: ~120 employees
How is Perl used?
- Within the specific business unit: Base for core products
- Messaging, mobile, web applications
- ~25 dedicated Perl software engineers
- ~560k lines of Perl code in repository trunks
Why Perl?
- Historic Reasons
- Codebase reaches back to 1999
- The two initial developers only had experience with VB and Perl at that time
Perl and the corporate company
- Perl not perceived as a development language
- Example: At a talk on dynamic languages at a company technology conference in 2007 Perl was not even mentioned.
Perl and the "Perl business unit"
- Company avoided explicitly telling customers which technology is used for the service they get as long as possible
- Perl considered a niche product not to be particularly proud of
- Some in management had perception of a technology lock-in
Benefits & Drawbacks
A subjective perception
Notes on the angle of view
- Period under observation: 2006-2009
- Angle of view of an Engineer and later Engineering Manager
