[za-pm] Fw: [pm_groups] Whatever happened to Perl?

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi,

this forwarded post refers to the immediately preceding post.

I have also noted to the writer that I believe that the 'popular' site
uporn also runs on Catalyst. I really wouldn't know, but it was
mentioned on the Catalyst list or on the IRC group.

Anne

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:44:32 -0400
From: Chris Prather <chris at prather.org>
To: Fred Moyer <fred at redhotpenguin.com>
Cc: PM Groups <pm_groups at pm.org>
Subject: Re: [pm_groups] Whatever happened to Perl?


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Fred Moyer <fred at redhotpenguin.com>
wrote:
> This article really deserves a read to help enlighten the author:
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/t/languages-and-standards/whatever-happened-perl-012


Having just spent two solid days last week talking to anybody who
wandered past about Modern Perl, there is really nothing I think we
can say to this author. His view point, despite knowing about Moose
and presumably Catalyst, is that you can't write modern applications
in Perl without taking a serious performance hit or writing
unmaintainable code. From a purely objective standpoint he's wrong. We
know he's wrong, because we do this all the time.

The problem is that he is not objective. This article is a pure
opinion piece used to troll for responses that re-enforce the frame
that his argument even begins to hold merit. The best thing we can do
as a community is not to break out the enlightenment torches, which I
admit was my first reaction until the registration-wall stopped me and
made me come to my senses. The best thing we can do as a community is
to emphatically point to the cases where we *do* have successes. Omni
Hotels makes $76 million annually in a Catalyst application. The BBC
uses Catalyst in league with several other architectures in their
iPlayer platform. Magazines.com, ThinkGeek.com, they are pure or
nearly-pure Perl application stacks. What *other* success stories can
we point to like these? We need to be talking about how Perl is
solving our problems today and adds value to our businesses.

Also we need to talk about how Perl solves problems other languages
haven't thought to solve yet. Moose's Roles are a feature that exists
in only a half dozen or so languages: Perl5 (Moose), Perl6, Scala,
Smalltalk, Lisp and possibly some more esoteric reference
implementations. Of these languages which has the largest adoption in
business? I'd make a serious bet that it is Perl5. Roles add some
serious value if you have a large object oriented code base. I saw on
twitter someone mentioning that ActiveRecord was just starting to get
features that DBIx::Class has had for years. While I'm sure that some
of these languages have features we can only dream of (I know the
Japanese Perl Mongers are stealing quite a bit from Ruby), and Perl
has some warts we can all point to (our native concurrency models all
suck right now IMO), we need to look at our successful spots and write
about them.

We need to talk about how our tool chain is established. How many
other languages have a CPAN? How many have three different clients
that can automatically chase and install dependencies? How many have
automatic smoke testing of every module in their comprehensive
archive? How many smoke test against a half dozen platforms, and at
least three major releases of the core language? How many people have
had their projects saved by being able to talk to the CPAN author and
get XYZ feature implemented/fixed/documented so that they can roll it
out into production on time?

These are the stories we need to tell. We need to point to articles
like this one as not just being *wrong*, but being so horribly
uniformed that they appear as obviously clueless as they actually are.

Right this was a bit more ranty than I intended, but I'm still
recovering from two days manning the TPF booth at OSCON. I've seen a
lot of mis-informed or poorly informed people in the last few days, so
I'm still a bit sensitive to it.

Carry on with whatever you were doing.

-Chris
Tamarou LLC -- Tamarou.com
--
Request pm.org Technical Support via support at pm.org

pm_groups mailing list
pm_groups at pm.org
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/pm_groups