Re: What can bring the excitement back to Perl?

in reply to What can bring the excitement back to Perl?

I think this question is usually phrased "What's the killer application?" (or similar).

I'm not following perl since the old days of perl 1.0 so my impression could be wrong, but I never thought of perl having one specific killer app.

CPAN is one, of course, but it's not the thing that really attracts people and that causes a hype.

But do we really need one? Do we want people to think "Perl? Isn't that the langue you're forced to use if you want $CoolTool?"?

I'd also like to know what happens to a language when its killer application loses popularity - any experiences here?

(BTW perl has many "killer features" like regexes and hashes - but other languages have them as well. Perl 6 will bring many more "killer features" like grammars and junctions.)

Comment on Re: What can bring the excitement back to Perl?

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Re^2: What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by kyle (Abbot) on Mar 25, 2008 at 14:30 UTC
... I never thought of perl having one specific killer app. In the mid 90's or so, CGI was the killer application. If you wanted dynamic content on the web, CGI was The Way to do it, and Perl was The Way to do CGI.	[reply]
Re^2: What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by nefigah (Monk) on Mar 26, 2008 at 01:10 UTC
CPAN is one, of course, but it's not the thing that really attracts people and that causes a hype. It got me :P I kept hearing everyone talk about CPAN and was like "maybe I better learn this language and see what this CPAN thing is about" I'm a peripheral visionary... I can see into the future, but just way off to the side.	[reply]
Re^3: What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by mcepl (Initiate) on Dec 03, 2008 at 17:09 UTC
widely popular page like this for Python -- whenever I need to do anything, I just go there (or its local copy) to find what I need. I don't know whether there is anywhere similar page for Perl, but I would love to have a set of "known to be good" libraries -- ONE for each purpose. Where is it?	[reply]
Re^4: What can bring the excitement back to Perl? by runrig (Abbot) on Aug 05, 2009 at 18:52 UTC
Funny, I went to that page to look for "ssh", something I've been dealing with lately. I didn't find anything there (is that list only for "core" modules?). I did go here, and didn't find any "one" definite thing there either. Even in Perl, there is no "one" module to use...the "one" to use depends on different things.	[reply]

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