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in reply to The Perl Hacker Inferiority Complex

I enjoyed Perl4. I was also glad when Perl5 came out, and as successive versions of Perl5 acm out, and CPAN dramatically expanded its capabilities, Perl has become a central part of my work life. Based on its current strengths and the promising plans for Perl6, my team at work is planning to move our legacy applications into Perl. I also really like Perl. I like the Perl community. I like the appreciation of language that it brings to working with computers. I'm even not that impatient about the wait for Perl6, since it was clear some time ago that Perl6 was a very large undertaking.

Thus am I one of the faithful. But as one of the faithful, I think there are some important issues highlighted in both Perl needs The Solution and Perl is dying. While Perl6 will give us a great deal, there are still some problems that it won't solve. And yes, some of those problems may be significant enough to blunt Perl's future success.

Pluralism is one of Perl's greatest strenghts, and responsible for much of its thriving success. While we're benefitting from pluralism, we also need to mittigate some of its costs. For me, the most important ways we can do this are to provide:

TheDamian has given us the first item on this list and we owe him our deep gratitude, both for seeing the need and for doing the job. While the recomenations are very good, IMO, for some purposes just the existence of authoritative recomendataions is the most important part, and is enough to take care of a score of reasonable concerns about Perl. When you're selling perl for a major project, and management has heard rumors about tower-of-babble coding practices, you can plunk his book down on the table and you don't have to say much after that.

If those with the knowledge and credibility can establish the other two items anywhere near as well as TheDamian has managed the first, with Best Practices, then Perl will be a very strong contender for being "the language for the rest of us". The additions won't make it any less of a wonderfully flexible language for those of us who already know it fairly well, they will just help others to follow.

This is not a matter of fad or fashion, it's just a matter of improving service to a wider community.

  • Comment on Re: The Perl Hacker Inferiority Complex

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Re^2: The Perl Hacker Inferiority Complex
by jmerelo (Sexton) on Jul 24, 2006 at 07:47 UTC
    There _is_ a Perl Best Practices, by HRH Damien Conway. Excellent book, BTW.
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Re^2: The Perl Hacker Inferiority Complex
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 25, 2006 at 13:28 UTC
    > package of modules for doing web apps
    Try WebGui - its more than a CMS, it is a "an application framework that handles content management".
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      Sigh. WebGui may be may be an absolutely wonderful system. For myself, I appreciate the tip and I will check into it further than I have, but my point was that most people who are newer to perl won't do that. There are many wonderful systems and modules out there providing functions that may be relevant to a first project. There are even some less wonderful systems that look good at the start. It's too much to deal with for someone who is learning his/her way around. Later, as experience grows, it can be a valuable education to look at what others have done and how they've done it, and it can be a satisfying exploration. We need to help people through the early stage so they can get to that later one.
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      WebGUI is not a framework IMHO, it just is a CMS with plugins. The original article mentions two web frameworks and they are the best IMHO: Catalyst and CGI::Application.
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