

Another Perl success story: The Swedish pension system - nixy
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/perl/news/swedishpension_0601.html

======
sverrejoh
Lately there seems to be much more Perl articles on the front page, is there
any particular reason for that? Is Perl suddenly getting more attention for
some reason?

~~~
randallsquared
Well, now that Parrot is doing releases above 1.0, it seems plausible that
Perl 6 might actually be a finished product one day. That was in serious doubt
for years.

~~~
torr
Since, for the most part, "Perl 6" = Parrot + Rakudo [1], the _big_ moment
(IMO) will be when Rakudo hits 1.0. There should be a serious spike in
interest at that point.

Hopefully the Perl community will take advantage of that spike. For example,
it would be cool to see mod_perl6/mod_parrot hit stable at around the same
time. Maybe even along with some key modules recoded in Perl 6 too (for
webapps, maybe CGI::Application?).

[1]: Yes, I realize Perl 6 is the spec, but my guess is that Parrot + Rakudo
will be the canonical implementation.

------
whirlycott1
Uh... that's from 07/06/2001.

~~~
mgreenbe
Indeed. And the age shows. In the section "Perl Wins the Comparison", they
explain Perl's advantages:

    
    
      Good database connectivity gave Perl the nod over C++, 
      and since Sandell and Johnson received project text files 
      in various formats, Perl's ability to parse text with 
      regular expressions was much better than COBOL or 
      Oracle's PL/SQL.
    

These aren't the comparisons that would be made today, though I am _very_
proud of Perl, having beaten COBOL and PL/SQL in a regex contest!

I also enjoyed the time-travel qualities of the conclusion of that section:

    
    
      They wrote the Web applications in Jscript, and other 
      parts of the system in Visual Basic. Some functions were 
      written in PL/SQL so they could be accessible from other 
      languages using the system. "If we did the project again, 
      we would probably strive to make more of it in Perl," 
      Sandell concedes. But with so little time, they couldn't 
      ask team members to learn a new language.
    

JScript no longer exists, unless it's a misnomer for JavaScript. Is it
considered best practice to use code rather than stored procedures? (The
question is genuine -- I'm not a software developer.)

~~~
hvs
JScript is Microsoft's name for ECMAScript.

------
systems
The good news is they are still relying (mostly) on Perl

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ppm.nu%2F7111.html&sl=sv&tl=en&history_state0=)

