http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=665114


in reply to Perl losing momentum ?

To build slightly on jetteros response, what are you doing about it? I can think offhand of a couple of different projects that might lower the barriers to getting started with Perl:

On the GUI question, personally I have reservations about the 'if you want to write a GUI, use something else' argument. I find most of the GUI facilities in Java even more grotesque and work intensive than Tk. Perl is a good enough general purpose language that I rarely have occasion to use anything else - relegating it to nothing but text processing and glue is IMO doing a huge disservice to Perl and all the people who've put massive amounts of work into facilities like Tk, Wx, Prima etc.

On a really general point for anyone reading this and thinking 'yeah, that might be good if someone did that': it can be difficult to get your head fully around the grassroots paradigm - I know I struggled with it quite recently. To try and make it clearer: If something needs doing, get on and do it. If you don't feel you're competent to do it, do it anyway - you're almost certainly wrong. Once something is underway if it looks useful people will help, and it can always be cleaned up and improved on later.

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"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."
John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".

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Re^2: Perl losing momentum ?
by jhourcle (Prior) on Jan 30, 2008 at 18:10 UTC
    Some of what you're talking about with the 'visual' Perl distribution, at least for Windows, is being worked on as "chocolate perl"