We hear a lot of people complaining that programming in Perl is too difficult, but I think that a lot of these problems stem from people making the opposite assumption – that writing Perl is easier than it actually is. Let me share a couple of examples. I’ve lightly disguised the companies in question – so if you think you recognise a place where we’ve worked together you’re probably wrong.

In the first, I’m working for a global organisation. Most of their bespoke software is written in Java, but (like pretty much every company) there are a few Perl programs running vital parts of the infrastructure. This company have also outsourced a lot of their maintenance work to another company in India. This Indian company has dozens of people who are dedicated to working on my client’s systems. But they are Java programmers and every once in while they need to do some work on a Perl program.

This company has an internal IRC network and there’s a Perl channel which I keep half an eye on whilst getting on with my work (which is maintaining a huge Perl program). A few times a day one of these Java programmers turns up on the Perl channel explaining a problem they have to solve in a Perl program and asking for help. In pretty much every case, the problem boils down to the Java programmer having major misconceptions about how Perl works. Perl programmers on the channel try their hardest to to help, but it’s often a frustrating experience. Usually the correct answer is “go away and read Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl, then you will understand how the code works”. But these programmers don’t have the time to do that. They need this task finished in an hour. Often it’s a task that could be easily achieved in an hour – but only after you’ve done the groundwork of understanding how Perl works.

The problem this company had was that Perl wasn’t seen as being as important as it actually was. People in the Indian company saw it as a “scripting language” that any of their (no doubt highly qualified) Java programmers would be able to use without any preparation or training. That’s clearly not the case.

But, I hear you say, that’s not fair. Perl and Java are really different languages. I’m glad you pointed that out as it’s a nice link to my second example.

In this example, I’m working for a dotcom company in London. Like so many dotcom companies they have a Perl codebase that was thrown together five years ago in a couple of months by people who didn’t really know what they were doing. This company has the added problem that they are finding it hard to recruit people with Perl experience. So they start recruiting people with experience of languages like Python and Ruby in the belief that these languages are so similar that the programming skills are completely interchangeable.

And, of course, Perl, Ruby and Python are all a lot closer to each other than they are to languages like Java. But there are differences. Important differences that aren’t just syntactic. I can read Python and Ruby just fine. But if I got a job where I had to write a lot of either of those languages, I wouldn’t assume that I could just pick it up by osmosis, I’d get a book and read about the language. If I was going permanent at the company, I might even suggest that they send me on a training course.

Conversations with these non-Perl programmers often took a predictable course. They’d start complaining that the code was hard to read. This was hard to counter as a lot of the code was horrible. But if you pointed out some of the newer and better code, they wouldn’t see the improvement. They would insist that somehow Ruby or Python code was inherently easier to read than Perl code. I’d try to point out that Perl programmers find Perl code as easy to read as Python (or Ruby) programmers find Python (or Ruby).

So there seems to be this perception that Perl should be as easy to read as Random Programmer’s favourite language. And I don’t understand why that is. Just because I’ve been programming for almost thirty years, I don’t expect to be able to program in any language I happen to look at – well, certainly not well enough to be paid for doing it.

I’m not sure what we can do to counter this misconception. I think it probably stems from the late 90s when everyone was writing Perl. And if everyone is doing something, then it must be really easy.Of course, most people were writing really horrible Perl because Perl isn’t as easy as they thought it was.

Not sure it’s possible to sum this up in a simple marketing slogan. “Perl is Easy (but not as easy as you think)”.

Also published on Medium.