[sf-perl] Perl search engine

[Joe Brenner]

yary <not.com at gmail.com> wrote:
> Joe Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:

> > Also, if I'm right that google has been ignoring some good
> > technologies (perl, postgresql), then it might be possible to
> > get a little edge over them by using them...
>
> For what it's worth, my understanding is that Google uses Perl in its
> release management,

And in a number of other corners, I would expect.  They don't entirely
let anti-perl snobbery dictate which companies they buy, for example.

> but its more of a Python & Java shop overall (eg
> what do they allow to run on the Google App Engine).

And admittedly you need to standardize on *something*, I'm just not
happy with their choices.

By the way, there's supposedly a "20% project" to get perl on the Google
App Engine.  It looks like it's been proceeding only in fits and starts
for the last few years, and isn't there yet:

  http://code.google.com/p/perl-appengine/

> Also back when Lycos was the only game in town, an acquaintance there
> told me their Perl was a performance hit, and they were rewriting
> anything that executed as a result of a visitor's search in C. That
> was circa 1994 and I never followed up.

Nice strategy.  I bet they had no problems with implementation or
maintenance at all.  And C programmers are legendary for their caution
in avoiding pointer errors and memory leaks, so I bet the code was
really high quality.