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I am a Perl hater, but mostly from having to dig into 10 year old legacy code for apps that nobody has touched for 5 years that still run.

So like on the one hand, old perl is basically unmaintainable punctuation vomit, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of 10 year old perl code out there just chugging a long, which is nothing to sneeze at.



I'm not disagreeing with you, but the first Perl project I started in 1999 in my dorm room had its latest, major release two days ago. I've never thought of maintaining your own Perl code as impossible. And I'm no wizard.

I've honestly wondered if maintaining someone else's forgotten Perl code, modernizing it, and getting it so that'll it'll run for another x years isn't all that bad of a niche job.


If someone is being paid to modernize a perl app, they almost certainly are intended to rewrite it in another language entirely.


No, that’s just bullshit. It’s very easy to write Modern Perl, and most companies with large Perl codebases break their codebases into service based architectures and then rewrite them bit by bit.


This was my thought, as well.


10 year old legacy apps that no one has touched in 5 years were written after S.C.O was let go. 10 year old code in any language kinda sucks.




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