[LA.pm] Perl Flagship Applications

[Alex Teslik]

On Tue, 4 May 2010 17:03:34 -0700, Aran Deltac wrote
> So, at the end of LA.pm this month one of our fellow mongers (I 
> forget his name, sorry) was talking about how he wished there were 
> more "flagship" Perl applications that could illustrate the power of 
> perl to a more general audience.  PHP has Drupal, Wordpress, 
> Mediawiki, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Java has Hadoop, Cassandra, etc, 
> etc, etc.  These flagship applications provide the underlying 
> language an automatic approval to the users of those applications. 
>  People who do not code in PHP or Java know of these applications 
> and what language they were written in because these application 
> proudly state what language(s) they are using.  This means that 
> managers, etc, are exposed to these languages as providing high 
> quality and highly complex software.
> 
> So, what I'm wondering is, what does perl have?
> 
> I know of one off the top of my head:  TWiki (http://twiki.org/)
> 
> I'm sure there are more.  Melody (the really open source version of Movable
> Type) will fall in this list once its released, I'm hoping.
> 
> And, if the person who brought this point up in the first place at LA.pm
> could speak up and maybe talk about what you were thinking that 
> would be great.
> 
> Aran


   Sheepishly, I am the guilty one who brought this up. I brought it up
because I feel there has been a large shift in the perception of Perl, and
that bothers me.

   In my opinion, Perl perception has shifted in the last 5 or so years from
"that software that runs Yahoo and a lot of the internet" to "that old
scripting language that nobody uses anymore". My argument to Aran was that one
of the root causes of that perception is that Perl is no longer "best of
breed" for the applications that people - *average people* - decide to use.
When I say average people, I'm talking about the guys who aren't gurus. The
ones who have mabye setup their first server and are looking to take some
software for a spin. They don't have an opinion yet, but they're forming one.
So they go looking for a blog app. Or a webmail. Or a photo app. Perl has
decent offerings to be sure... but they don't look as polished as the PHP,
Ruby, or Python apps. So the average guy installs the others.

   As time progresses, he has to hack here and there and slowly learns those
other languages. Not because he purposely set out to do it, but because that's
what the best of breed apps were written in at the time. He didn't *not*
choose Perl on purpose, but it happened. Now he's above average and he goes
looking for the next level stuff like a CMS. Or a bugtracker. Or a wiki. Or a
mailing list manager. Again, Perl has decent offerings... but a lot of it is
trapped in tables or custom markup languages. The other offerings separate
logic and presentation so he can adapt the code for his site with less effort.
In short, the Perl stuff feels old. Worse, the Perl stuff looks old.

   By and by, that average guy eventually becomes the next lead developer. But
he's not developing on Perl because the best of breed apps weren't Perl when
he first needed something. Perl suffers. Even though it is equally capable to
all the other languages, it's not attracting the talent.

   So my point in the parking lot that night was less, "What are the flagship
Perl apps?", but more "Why are the flagship Perl apps no longer the best of
breed?"

Thanks,
Alex