A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale • Hacker News Board

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#31

Post by autarch » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

fahrradflucht wrote: post #27

freyfogle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would this surprise you? Perl continues to improve and is battle tested. More Perl is written today than ever before (that said, much more software in general is written than ever before, and there is no doubt Perl's share has declined). Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.

Two great talks when it comes to the questionable greatness of Perl: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292... https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2

These are really not great talks at all. The speaker doesn't seem to actually know much about Perl, and it seems like the flaws he's found have little to do with Perl, and more to do with just writing insecure code.

See http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2015/12/response-to-... for one response and some discussion in the comments.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#32

Post by fennecfoxen » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #7

marghidanu wrote: post #2

I fully resonate with this article! For the last few years I've been trying to do the same thing and in the last 2 years I can say that we successfuly managed to create a similar thing using Perl. More than this we are developing all our web services with Mojolicious we are running them on top of Mesos using Docker. We use Module::Build for packaging the app and to be honest I find it more reliable than using any oth…

In much the same way that PHP has a reputation for being "bad", Perl has a reputation (ill-deservedly!) for being line-noise, or obsolete. I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day. Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is its…

I think the fastest way to convince yourself that Perl is obsolete is to try to hire for good Perl programmers. It's a fine language if you treat it well, but it's going the way of COBOL.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#33

Post by mst » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

ashimema wrote: post #22

maxhou wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM) do you have something to recommend ? used Rose::DB in the past, then I discovered SQLAlchemy and it's difficult to look back...

1 point by ashimema 0 minutes ago | edit | delete Love DBIx::Class.. but it's not a good/perfect fit for Mojolicious by a long way.. it's blocking by nature and thus doesn't play too nicely if your aiming to write a non-blocking mojo app. reply

For the few queries where you need async (most should be fast enough in the first place), there's no reason you can't use $rs->as_query to get hold of the SQL and bind values and then feed those into Mojo::Pg.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#34

Post by rsync » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:30 PM UTC

n_coats wrote: post #23

Nice post! At my most recent job, we used perl daily for processing scripts and many other functions. After initially having similar thoughts about it being "obsolete" and a "dinosaur", I quickly realized how resilient and flexible the language is (I know the flexibility can come with some criticism). We investigated a lot of other options (go & python specifically) when building new projects, but found that perl was…

"After initially having similar thoughts about it being "obsolete" and a "dinosaur", I quickly realized how resilient and flexible the language is (I know the flexibility can come with some criticism)."

Not obsolete - can affirm. All of the Oh By[1] back end is written in perl, circa 2016. We use apache + mod_perl and are very happy with this environment ... just like we were in 1998.

[1] https://0x.co

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#35

Post by justinator » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #32

stevekemp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In much the same way that PHP has a reputation for being "bad", Perl has a reputation (ill-deservedly!) for being line-noise, or obsolete. I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day. Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is its…

I think the fastest way to convince yourself that Perl is obsolete is to try to hire for good Perl programmers. It's a fine language if you treat it well, but it's going the way of COBOL.

Perl programmer here of 17 years. I'm happy to look into new projects.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#36

Post by jrumbut » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #34

n_coats wrote: post #23

Nice post! At my most recent job, we used perl daily for processing scripts and many other functions. After initially having similar thoughts about it being "obsolete" and a "dinosaur", I quickly realized how resilient and flexible the language is (I know the flexibility can come with some criticism). We investigated a lot of other options (go & python specifically) when building new projects, but found that perl was…

"After initially having similar thoughts about it being "obsolete" and a "dinosaur", I quickly realized how resilient and flexible the language is (I know the flexibility can come with some criticism)." Not obsolete - can affirm. All of the Oh By[1] back end is written in perl, circa 2016. We use apache + mod_perl and are very happy with this environment ... just like we were in 1998. [1] https://0x.co

Any thoughts about switching to plack? It seems like maybe you could get some low effort performance/developer experience improvements.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#37

Post by tmaly » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

I have been using Perl to do similar things. I build everything internally in the same manner as one would a CPAN module, and this is checked into a private git repo.

From there it is simple to call custom tools to build and deploy services in Perl.

My favorite feature about Perl is that version 5.x is compatible with each release and our code has worked without issue for over a decade.

I recently integrated some Go code into part of my module and wrote a post about how to compile it as part of the build process here : http://www.tysonmaly.com/programming/go/using-go-perl-makefi...

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#38

Post by rixed » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

spriggan3 wrote: post #13

mschuster91 wrote: post #9

It surprises me Perl isn't dead yet - in fact, German Bundeskriminalamt built a website for people having information about the German nazi hool riots during the France EM 2016 in Perl: https://www.bka-hinweisportal.de/

Perl is bundled with many linux distributions and is a hard dependency for many popular programs. It isn't going away.

Neither is m4!

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#39

Post by Roboprog » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

Perl is also one of the fastest things out there - if your problem is doing lots of string handling. I have this little test that does a lot of string concatenation and garbage creation, which I recently pulled out of the closet to compare Javascript on Node and Javascript on Nashorn (and also native Java, since it was already there). Even on Java 8, Perl still blows it away.

That said, I hate working with references in the Perl debugger, and, I would be lynched at most worksites, at least in Sacramento, if I suggested a Perl back end. ...Which is too bad - Java/ORM, "COBOL-fingers", bondage and discipline forever...

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#40

Post by oalders » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #32

stevekemp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In much the same way that PHP has a reputation for being "bad", Perl has a reputation (ill-deservedly!) for being line-noise, or obsolete. I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day. Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is its…

I think the fastest way to convince yourself that Perl is obsolete is to try to hire for good Perl programmers. It's a fine language if you treat it well, but it's going the way of COBOL.

It's not _that_ hard to hire good Perl programmers. Maybe it depends on they scale you need to hire for, but I've been involved in the hiring process for a couple of Perl positions and I've seen lots of really strong candidates.