>This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone
I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :
My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.
There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.
The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.
So, your comment rang a bell.
Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.
Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned
Most of them run Debian (some have Windows VMs running on those Debian machines), while a minority use Ubuntu. I reboot them once every few years when I upgrade the OS, kernel, or migrate to newer machine types.
I run most of the workloads in containers, but there are also some VMs (mostly Windows) and some workloads use Firecracker micro vms in containers.
A small number of machines are rebooted more often because they occasionally need new kernel features, and their workloads aren't VM friendly, so they run on bare metal.
Haha! we named our software Marica for "Management des risques et des contrats d'assurance" (we're a French company).
We have since translated the software in several languages. It appears that marica in spanish means something like queer in English when used against homosexuals, only _more_ derogatory amongst these macho people :-(
Web UI is an interesting problem, but even just building a proper data structure can be very challenging, when the user's environment is complex and one needs to build a simple yet extensive enough tool.
I see it a bit as rock climbing : I looks simple, but not everyone can do it right.
"But when you look at it as a probability rather than as an absolute, yes, you should expect more popular things to be better than less popular things, no? "
Possibly in areas where no serious money is involved, but I haven't experienced this in the big corporate/government world myself. It can occasionally be true, but it's certainly not the rule
I think this generally applies in that case: "often what you find underneath is a mismatch between what the arguer thinks is better and what the people who chose the popular thing think is better."
A simple example of this would be going with the bloated, more expensive, more error prone product. It may just be that service contracts, existing relationships, available support or even just name recognition (Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft...) trump those in some cases.
Just yesterday, I moved some 100 lines of code using a hash quite a few times from the main module to a function using a reference to the hash.
if %args is the hash holding the data, '$args{key}' tells me the value of 'key' in the main module.
a reference to the hash passed to the function is noted like so : '$args = \%args';$args->{key} tells me value of 'key'
All I had to do to adapt the code was to replace '$args{' with '$args->{', done by the time I typed the replace command in my editor.
Funny that it just makes sense to me, must be something with the brain's wiring.
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