[crankylinuxuser]

You'd be scarily surprised just how much telecommunications runs on Perl5 ranging around the ~150GB level.

I had my stint at an ISP that worked with around 40 state level and national orgs. I saw the underbelly of how things work, and its frankly scary.

[gpvos]

Nothing wrong with Perl5 though.

[crankylinuxuser]

There is when much of the code was "write once, read never". There's more than a a few dozen MB blobs of dense perl5 code that we had no clue what it actually did, and was told not to touch it, lest many things break.

I had to end up touching one of them, because of things breaking with that subsystem and the new ticketing system that was being implemented. It had the wonderful line

     database_user = root
     database_password = [current mysql root password]

Lest to say, I no longer work there.

[TeMPOraL]

Every time I write some crap code at work, someone on HN tells a story about such horrors that I no longer feel bad. Thanks for making my day better :).