I think it's hard to say something is "dead" when it is used over and over in many applications everyday. It's almost the same thing as saying landline telephones are dead. Well no, they aren't actually.
Joined: 25 Jun 2004 Posts: 130 Location: Liverpool(home) or Derby(uni), UK votes: 3
Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:13 pm Post subject:
Reading some of the comments in that reminded me of an article I read. It goes like this:
Quote:
In 1907, 19-year-old Jim Casey borrowed $100 to set up a Seattle, Washington-based message delivery service. Nearly a century later the resultant company - UPS - leads the global package delivery market, with revenues just shy of $12 billion. It is a company where IT plays an integral part in delivering operational improvements: its annual IT budget tops $1 billion.
And yet somehow this forward-thinking centenarian is still using mainframe programs that were first run almost 40 years ago.
Nicholas Gray, vice president of information systems, Europe at UPS, is aware of the radical changes afoot in the logistics industry brought on by advances in information technology. He recently told delegates at the Economist Conferences' Annual CIO and IT Director Summit that RFID tagging was not quite mature enough to replace barcodes yet. However, the likelihood of millions of IP-addressable packages being shipped globally would necessitate a shift to the next generation Internet communications protocol IPv6.
Currently, much of the computing power UPS employs to track packages is done on 15 mainframes, based in its two major US-based data centres, along with four other smaller centres at locations in Europe and Asia.
[here comes the relevant part]
And while the company strives to keep ahead of the competition through innovative use of technology - package-loading robots have already been trialled - it is not afraid to keep using legacy systems that have proved their worth. When asked, Gray did reveal that these mainframes were still using some Fortran code that was "close to 40 years old".
However, Gray's candour was not matched by other conference delegates, all of whom were senior IT business leaders. Not a single one would volunteer information on any systems they ran that could rival UPS for longevity.
I guess a lot of that article was irrelevant, except for the fortran part. The title of the article was "If it aint broke...", and well, that same thing can be applied to perl. As was mentioned in the replies to the Digg post, perl has proven its worth. While I agree that perl is being used less and less in websites, you just have to take one look at CPan to see that this does not mean the languages demise. Personally I would have said Fortran was dead, but not according to that article.
I very much think perl has a long way to go before it dies out. I do think its time in CGI is coming to a close, but not completely so for at least a good few years.
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