[San-Diego-pm] Is Perl finally dying? [was: Seen this?]

Alex Tokarev dwalin at dwalin.ru
Wed Jul 31 11:44:58 PDT 2013


Sorry if that may sound too harsh but I call BS on this one; she's talking
about the outreach and marketing but what that has to do with the real
world? Nobody chooses a language for a project based on how cool the
language is perceived! Everybody's looking for the killer features that
would help them crank out cool shit in no time, and that's about the only
reason to adopt any new (old?) language.

Now don't get me wrong, I chose Perl for a greenfield project (that's
about to hit the market, finally) because Perl gave me several things I
needed and it was *easier* to go with all Perl's kinks rather than try to
adapt something else. Am I going to continue with Perl on that project?
Abso-frigging-lutely, because the problems and solutions are still there
and will be there. Will I necessarily choose Perl for another, different
project? Whoa there, who said one size fits 'em all?

Which actually brings us to another problem: locked-in-eness. Why is
everybody so obsessed with Perl not being used *EVERYWHERE*? Why is it so
typical for Perlers to dramatize everything around Perl? What's so special
about Perl, anyway? It's a TOOL. It's used to do THINGS. If you need to do
a different thing, use a different tool!

As for the graphs showing the age of Perlers based on YAPC attendance,
that is a very dubious proposition at best. Attending a conference costs
money, a lot of it. Who will pay for Joe the junior dev to attend just
because they could? Yeah, um. Better let's send Jack the senior dev over
there, maybe he'll pick up some cool idea that'd benefit the whole team,
and if not he'd just have a good time with the old buddies.

There is a ton of people out there who are interested in Perl. They won't
learn it unless Perl offers them FEATURES that make time investment
worthwhile. They won't learn it unless they can find PAYING JOBS requiring
Perl knowledge, and there won't be any jobs without FEATURES that make
using Perl *cheaper* in the long run than anything else. All the rest is
BS.

So in the end, is Perl dying or not? Eh, who cares. As long as it solves
my problems, I'm gonna use it. When it stops solving my problems or
becomes too costly to use, I'll switch. It's that simple.

Regards,
Alex.

On 7/31/13 9:59 AM, "Chris Grau" <chris.grau at gmail.com> wrote:

>This time, with content (curse you Gmail)!
>
>On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Joel Fentin <joel at fentin.com> wrote:
>> 
>>https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-the-detroit-of-scripting-langu
>>ages
>
>Possibly related, this series of blog posts came up while I was at
>OSCON last week.
>
>http://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2013/07/22/the-rising-costs-of-aging-p
>erlers-part-1-the-data/
>http://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2013/07/22/the-rising-costs-of-aging-p
>erlers-part-2-the-business/
>http://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2013/07/22/the-rising-costs-of-aging-p
>erlers-part-3-the-suggestions/
>_______________________________________________
>San-Diego-pm mailing list
>San-Diego-pm at pm.org
>http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/san-diego-pm




More information about the San-Diego-pm mailing list