I am a long time UNIX system administrator and open source advocate. In recent years my primary focus as been on Linux & FreeBSD systems administration, networking, telecom, and SAN/storage management. I love building infrastructure, tying systems together, creating processes, and bringing people together in support of their technical efforts.
When I can, I try to contribute back to the open source projects either with patches, or by helping others in technical support forums.
Authored Comments
Thanks for your thoughtful response, and points well taken.
I seems to see more often than not, across various discussions, issues revolving around fixed deadline dates and fixed feature delivery expectations. Those are not always compatible with agile and can hamper the process of innovation as the cycle of trust/debate/experimentation/etc. is limited by the constraints of the demand.
Great article and response, thanks!
I still love perl 5 for text file processing and performing sysadmin functions where shells and other languages don't fit well. I can say however that I've never liked the perl module system and often found myself in dependency hell trying to get something seemingly simple to work. New comers like python/pip and node/npm have done much better with that.
Others here mentioned web technologies ... I never thought perl was well integrated into the likes of apache and made things complicated. PHP won there because it wasn't really a CLI tool forced into double-duty .. it was a first-class web module citizen and in my opinion more easy in syntax than perl.
I think also perl's syntax flexibility works against it. I've seen developers take pride in producing very obtuse (and unmaintainable) code. That's really the fault of the coder ... but when you're the one stuck debugging some really insane syntax the language gets under your skin.
I still feel every tool has it niche ... perl will probably always be by first go-to for sysadmin and text processing tasks. But I'll admit, I'm drawn to other languages when I need to produce more substantial code, end user application, web apps. etc.