Re: The Enlightened Perl Iron Man Competition

[mikeraz]

First Read the Schwern Talk.

Matt's proposal to "make noise" by blogging (as opposed to just writing excellent code, which should be enough) is … Should be enough?

When I want a furnace or kitchen cabinets I don't go looking for sources of sheet metal, fine wood, and components, gather them up and take them to my shop for construction. I buy a furnace or cabinets, maybe even having them installed by pros.

Perl and CPAN are warehouses full of all the supplies you could wish with readily available tools to use in your contruction. PHP is a showroom of reasonably shiny products ready for easy DIY installation.

Ready to use is enticing. Enticing enough to get someone to try and modify the bits (theme customization anyone?) and get drawn into using the language. Consider all the contorted work that has gone into speadsheet construction instead of db development. Consider the "first is free offer" from drug dealers and cable ISPs. The PHP community understands this in their gut: make the entry point dead simple.

Yeah, we can blog. What are we going to draw the toddlers among coders too?

My challenge (to myself and others): help make Movable Type better. Especially the installation process. Make easy to modify themes and widgets so people can become entranced with the shiny bits and lured into modifying them. Why Movable Type? It's the most accessible blogging platform that is Perl based.

Why improve a blogging platform? Why not make some other cool use of the web thing? The Iron Man Challenge is about blogging. Let's make Perl based blogging tools easier to get for the novice. As to some othe cool thing, I have no idea what the next cool thing is. So I won't poison your thinking by suggesting one.

But, if you haven't done it yet: Read the Schwern Talk.

[Jenda]

Yep, ready to use. Or rather so it seems.

The boss wanted a blog software ... do you think WordPress was "install and go"? Nope, dude. I had to dig into the code to find out what the heck prevents it from working at all.

Later , the boss wanted a Wiki. We tried MediaWiki (PHP) ... we never ran out of problems. And it's far from warnings free. Apparently the authors never expected anyone to run it with warnings turned on. Which considering the fact that the warnings showed within the pages ... so we tried PMWiki (PHP). The same problems. The code is buggy. Compared to Foswiki (Perl) it's simply ... PHP. I had to dig into the code in all those cases. Neither of the installations was problem free (in the last case, because I needed to use IIS which is oficially not supported), but the Foswiki was still the easiest to get working.