This guy may have gotten Perl out of his part of the JP Morgan world, but JP Morgan still actively uses Perl. It’s not as big as it once was, but there are teams still developing and deploying Perl.
This is what I figured. My experience of SW development at a merchant bank is siloed teams using their own development tools to support their banking operations. There was never a company wide mandate on using/not using some technology.
That's not the case in JP Morgan. Development is very centralized.
There are like 3 to 6 major platforms used inside of JP Morgan, depending how you count (the oldest one is deprecated and being migrated away which will never complete, while the newest one is nowhere near working and will not have anything running for a long time).
The largest one regroups maybe 30% of all the developers and developments in the firm.
The Perl system was underlying on of these platforms, and has clients for use in all other platforms, so it was quite ingrained across the entire company really.
Reminds me of a quote from the Learning Perl book:
"There's a joke among Perl developers that the next economic crash will be caused by a bug in someone's Perl script. Even then, all those redundant economists will have at least one employable skill."