Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

I'd venture to guess that they aren't doing that because there's little to no market for it.

Although Perl is now a general-purpose programming language, it originated as a scripting language for UNIX systems administration and for parsing text files. Perl's traditional use case is one where you're working on a UNIX server through an SSH terminal, so you only have vi/vim or maybe emacs. In that situation, GUI IDEs are not really an option, and trying to use them kind of goes against the whole purpose and culture of Perl. If you're using Perl, you're probably already comfortable working in a command line terminal and have no need for an IDE.

Also, Perl is complicated and looks "like a cartoon character swearing" (-pg) but a nice thing about Perl is that to learn it, you really only need a computer with an OS (which will come with Perl installed on it as long as it isn't Windows) and the camel book.

The largest reason why I would hesitate to use Perl in my startup would be the core philosophy of TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). Being able to write something multiple different ways leads to Perl being a lot easier to write than it is to read. As a result code maintenance can become a huge headache due to someone not understanding the idioms used by the person who originally wrote the code.

I've seen this happen on a number of projects that I've worked with using Perl. Typically a person wouldn't be familiar with "silver ball" (Effective Perl Programming), would go off an write a large body of code which would be difficult to wade through. This gets exacerbated by new coders not understanding how perl expects you to understand some of its idioms (like $_, @_, etc.) implicitly. Because reading other people's code is a great way to learn a language, this makes Perl a lot less approachable.

I think Ruby suffers from some of these problems to a certain degree as well. I haven't worked with Ruby professionally, but in the few times I've played around with it I've found myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out which looping construct I should use over another.

Python does have a leg up in this department. The language tends to be fairly succinct and things like Pep8 and flake8 really help in making most code fairly digestible.

Ever heard of Komodo? I've been using it for years for Perl development, plus it supports Python, Ruby, and a host of other languages.

I wouldn't consider doing any serious Perl dev without it.

It was an interview on a Perl blog, so the target audience is people already enthusiastic about Perl.

Here's why I think learning Perl is worth it: a lot of programmers write stuff in it. It won't make you know other languages any less.

As an aside: Blekko is a PERL company (not sure if they qualify as a startup anymore).