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Perl on Rails (2007)

by jdefelice on 11/16/22, 12:36 PM with 65 comments

  • by petesergeant on 11/18/22, 8:20 AM

    Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T.

    At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash.

    Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScript now, but I miss working with Perl.

  • by mmaunder on 11/18/22, 7:11 AM

    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 wanted to build a framework.

    In 2007 Perl had thousands of MVC frameworks in CPAN. The idea that the solution to static file hosting is to build yet another MVC framework is absurd. They did and were surprised Perl is fast. Yeah. It always was. And they reinvented the wheel.

  • by blop on 11/18/22, 1:13 PM

    I miss perl.

    I don't think there are any other scripting languages that allow you to write very concise one-liners that can do very complex things. That's also where perl got its bad reputation from, but it's more a discipline issue than a language problem. I always rewrote my explorative one-liners more cleanly when I committed them to a final program, but nothing forces you to do it like python does.

  • by rvieira on 11/18/22, 8:36 AM

    Shouldn't it be Perl on Pails?

  • by hestefisk on 11/18/22, 1:07 PM

    Those who do not understand Perl are doomed to reinvent it.

  • by tiffanyh on 11/18/22, 7:33 PM

    Reminds me of SQL on Rails.

    https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg

    I still crack up about this. Context is that in the early days of Rails, they did a lot of screencast showing how easy it was to create a blog and tons of code was generated for you making seem like with just a few commands you could create anything.

  • by jamesfinlayson on 11/18/22, 6:35 AM

    ... I'm guessing it was replaced by something a while ago now?

  • by _dan on 11/18/22, 12:34 PM

    Is that Tom Scott as in Tom Scott?

  • by that_guy_iain on 11/18/22, 12:51 PM

    Last I heard the BBC moved to PHP about 10-years ago

  • by stevebmark on 11/18/22, 7:44 AM

    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.