in reply to a lot of the CPAN big hitters have gone
Yes. And this is a natural segue point for something I’ve been trying to articulate. A lot of hackers treat crucial developers like these folks—and others not named, and you—like they are basically… struggling for the right word… coolies. Little deference, little respect, less help, just demands and complaints and lectures about responsibilities and socially acceptable participation when handing over the goodies. This would drive me out. It did drive me away from a major CPAN project a few years ago actually. It might only reveal what a big baby I am but it took just one of these episodes to kill my public participation.
This is not everyone, obviously, or that stark a line. It is more common than it should be though and it frequently comes from devs at my level—seniorish contributors but not core patching, 100 distributions contributors—who should know better and be a defense layer for our “betters.”
I was trying to do something with websockets against a stock/securities trading API last night. I ended up running npm install -g wscat to get going instead of using Perl. I don’t have the chops or time to work out what I want in Perl with existing websocket packages and the JS was trivial to install and use. I harp on it but JS is becoming amazing and it’s mostly not the language, it’s the tools.
Perl’s tool makers are its life blood; its future. They need to be protected and revered, or whatever personal version of that one can summon. Thanksgiving week in the States. I am deeply thankful for every developer who has written code that helps me write mine.