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Perl on Rails (2007)

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#61

Post by mst »

mmaunder wrote: post #7

I worked at the beeb around 2003 and built a very high traffic Perl application for Radio 1 called OneMusic to launch unsigned bands. It was interactive, not static, hit MySQL directly and blazingly fast. Was a huge success using existing libs. This was pre nginx on our public facing Apache/modperl and it handled very high traffic. BBC did have non static Perl applications so this whole thing is a false premise. They…

I did two tranches of consultancy at the BBC.

One, I fixed all of that team's problems but because I swore a lot under my breath about their existing code while I was doing so that team decided to be offended and made a decision to never invite me back (note, I quite possibly deserved that reaction, I'm still a blunt bastard but in those days I had the social skills of a thermonuclear device even as compared to now.)

Two, I helped fix the iPlayer 2.0 rollout by spending two days teaching them how to DBIx::Class better and then spent the third day ripping through their code (with the team's encouragement) and managed to save the "show all programs of the same series" feature by breaking (with the PMs and the team's encouragement) its ability to be correct down to the hour across daylight saving time changes by replacing DateTime with Date::Calc.

Damn good fun, and some of the most satisfying in the "I have earned what you paid for this and it makes me happy" days of my career.

I think the only days of work I've enjoyed more were the time I spent two days diagnosing a problem with an NHS cancer lab sample tracking system that turned out to be a weird interaction between three different bugs in various things.

Note: If you were a shadowcat.co.uk customer at the time and were one of the people to whom I said "sorry about this but this is a cancer lab, my previous commitments to deadlines are dead until I get this fixed" and replied with "well, yeah, of course they are, we knew who you were when we hired you, good luck", I love you all.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#62

Post by mst »

thanatos519 wrote: post #21
stevebmark wrote: post #8

Ruby is well known as the “bad parts of Perl” so there’s a beautiful horror here. It’s also funny that Ruby is the slowest of the dynamic languages, and that Perl is much faster. They created a magnificent mind bending nightmare.

I think of Ruby as "The Perl that Python wanted to be"

ruby is basically a shinier cleaner perl with unfortunately castrated OO

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#63

Post by petesergeant »

mst wrote: post #54
petesergeant wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, great work! I've submitted it as its own story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656829

Having released SQL::Abstract 2 people are trying to convince me to port things. Since the SQLA2 expr layer was deliberately designed to be JSONable I have a horrible feeling I can actually do so and I might actually crack and do it, but if I do I'll be writing vanilla ES6. If you love typescript enough more, a commit bit will be yours for the asking.

If you write it in vanilla ES6, I can probably type it for you.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#65

Post by damagednoob »

mmaunder wrote: post #7

I worked at the beeb around 2003 and built a very high traffic Perl application for Radio 1 called OneMusic to launch unsigned bands. It was interactive, not static, hit MySQL directly and blazingly fast. Was a huge success using existing libs. This was pre nginx on our public facing Apache/modperl and it handled very high traffic. BBC did have non static Perl applications so this whole thing is a false premise. They…

> And they reinvented the wheel.

Buried amongst the comments was this from one of the creators:

> On the live environment we were told at the time we had Perl 5.6, and a few BBC approved perl modules. Nothing more! So that meant that catalyst a other solutions were out.

I guess this could have been a defensive security policy. I think CPAN has had relatively few supply chain attacks like npm, pypi, et al. But that's probably due to it's popularity.

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