FOSS Project in Perl
FOSS Project in Perl
Posted Sep 17, 2011 22:04 UTC (Sat) by plaxx (guest, #53703)In reply to: Perl 5.16 and Relevance by kragilkragil2
Parent article: Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond
The choice of Perl was done before my time so I can't tell why it was decided that way but I can say that it has proven to be very productive (developer time wise), easy for users to do customization and easy for us to implement quick on-site fixes or apply patches to clients (because no recompilation required). Also, network administrators seems to be speaking Perl more than anything else so they are familiar with it.
I am not saying that Python doesn't apply to all the above (I believe it does) but so does Perl and a project with that history won't be reimplemented just because the cool kid around the block is python these days. It would not be economic to do so.
Full disclosure: I am PacketFence's lead developer living the dream of doing open source for a living at Inverse (http://inverse.ca).