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in reply to Moose - my new religion

I don’t want to hijack a Moose-oriented thread to discuss what might (or might well not) be “the future of Perl as we know it.”   Because perhaps the biggest mistake of the Perl-6 project was ... to call it “Perl.”   It is a new language.   And what is going to determine its eventual commercial success (or lack thereof) is ... not its language ... but rather, its compatibility with existing CPAN modules.

We don’t use Perl because of its language-goodness.   (Of which it has, uhhhh, “not much.”)   We use it because of the vast and well-tested CPAN library.   (IMHO...)

A distinctive feature of Moose is that it enhances the language within the context of Perl-5, and therefore maintains full compatibility with all of CPAN.

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Re^2: Moose - my new religion
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 29, 2011 at 14:07 UTC
    We don't use Perl because of its language-goodness

    I do. The CPAN don't enter into it for me at that level. I was virtually unaware of its existence—but not of its various competitors in the high level language space—for the first 5 years I was slinging Perl. I know it's a little bit of the post "Death of Perl" party-line that sure Perl sucks but, hey, look! the CPAN! I've never felt that way at all. I wouldn't be a software engineer if I couldn't use Perl at least most of the time. Paraphrasing what TEH DAMIAN said: I like Perl because it lets me hack the way I think.

      Took me a long time to find CPAN as well, and when I did I found the vast array of modules really daunting at first.
Re^2: Moose - my new religion
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Nov 28, 2011 at 05:23 UTC
    Because perhaps the biggest mistake of the [Perl 6] project was ... to call it “Perl.”

    Oh, please! Anything but that silly debate again. Without a time machine, there is absolutely nothing interesting anyone can possibly contribute to the discussion that hasn't come up countless times already in the past eleven years.

Re^2: Moose - my new religion
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 29, 2011 at 11:18 UTC
    Because perhaps the biggest mistake of the Perl-6 project was ... to call it “Perl.” It is a new language.

    Yes and no. Yes - because it has a lot of features built in the core of the language itself (first being difference between method and subroutine, for example), and No - because it feel's like Perl. And it feels like Perl because you can comunicate to it in the same way you talk to Perl 5. The "spirit" of expression evalation process is there. It does the right thing from the first time you try to use it.

    We don’t use Perl because of its language-goodness. ... We use it because of the vast and well-tested CPAN library.

    Yes we do. CPAN is here so we don't have to reimplement stuff from scratch again and again. On the other hand, when working on a new problem I feel most comfortable expressing it in Perl. Later on, I might translate the solution to another platform - mostly for performance reasons. I like Perl because it's Perl, not because of CPAN. I use CPAN for boring problems, and to advocate it's uses to other to solve their boring problems too.