The whole confusion about frameworks and CMSes and whatnot aside, I’ve been wondering about something similar, just about forum software.

Why are all the forum engines written in (ancient-ish) PHP? Or if not, they’re in ASP. Every other language, including Perl, but also Python and Ruby (which are slightly more known for their webbiness) have none that are worth the bother really. It’s a bit disappointing. (As is the PHP ones’ insistence for using MySQL, but that’s a rant for another day.)

Update: It seems there’s some confusion about things and people think I don’t know that PerlMonks runs on Perl.

When I’m talking about forums, I’m thinking about things like YaBB (that was Perl, later became yabbSE and then SMF), phpBB, vBulletin, and the likes. For this class of bulletin boards, LanX’s example below about Perl-community.de is a good one. PerlMonks, yCombinator, SlashDot and so on have a very different way of working with, probably partly because of the threading, but probably for other reasons that I can’t really put my finger on. There’s also StackOverflow that one could call a forum, but, not sure...

I had googled and wikipediad (that’s a word now) and looked at things that those searches resulted in, and I saw some seriously wonky-looking, long-not-maintained things. I’ve seen SMF from the inside, it’s not pretty — yet for that genre of forums it’s one of the best out there and there seems to be no challenger out there that could serve any of the other three languages.