Hi! I'm the author of the Perl paint-splatter paper.
"That lady" is Adrienne Porter Felt, who started as an engineer working on Google Chrome security a decade or so ago, and is now a Director of Engineering who manages a sizable chunk of the Chrome team.
I never worked with her directly, but she has a reputation as a good manager and I'm pretty sure she knows how programmers work.
If you've been running a 1997-era Perl app unmodified --including the operating system of the machine it's running on, and security patches to Perl in the mean time -- you are so owned and I really hope you're not storing any important data on that box.
I'm not saying that App Engine is a panacea, but regardless of how you write your code and what technologies you use, there'll be some sort of mandatory maintenance and system administration that you have to do every so often.
That's a fair point, however my personal expectation would be that unlike a perl (or PHP or Python or .. solution), App Engine probably won't exist in its current form as a supported product in 16 years.
Maybe it'll go the way of Wave, or perhaps hopefully the technology style itself will simply be supplanted by newer and better. Regardless I'd say that given an app today, the 1997 perl5 app (MySQL 3.2 and perl5.003 were already circulating) still has much better supportability prospects over this time frame than App Engine ever did or ever will.
"That lady" is Adrienne Porter Felt, who started as an engineer working on Google Chrome security a decade or so ago, and is now a Director of Engineering who manages a sizable chunk of the Chrome team.
I never worked with her directly, but she has a reputation as a good manager and I'm pretty sure she knows how programmers work.