Re: Would you stay with Perl if there were no CPAN?

[curiousmonk]

Though CPAN is Perl's killer app. I would say much of Perl's early success came without CPAN. For most of my daily Perl work, I hardly use CPAN.

Its just that if you watch Larry Wall's talks on Perl 6, you will see why Perl had such viral adoption. Perl is designed to fill a niche which was totally empty when it came out. And that continues to be the state till today's date.

When I first learned Perl in 2006(This was actually the time when 'When Perl is dead' screaming was its highest), actually I was pretty late to the party. I was predominantly a Electronics guy and had experience working only with Assembly language and C. When I took up a job at a MegaCorp, I started using C. Then I went through that phase of using C and mashing with a dozen unix text processing utils. A colleague once saw what I was doing on the monitor as asked me to look into Perl. And that was it. I didn't even have a internet connection(I'm serious, the company was not a very programmer friendly company). All I had was the Camel Book. For the next six months I did pretty much all the work with Perl, without even knowing CPAN even existed. And pretty much nearly every body around me did the same.

Only 6 months later, another colleague of mine who had joined us recently, introduced us to CPAN. It didn't change the reason why we were using Perl. It just added more reasons.

I'd say for Perl is still indispensable, for nearly anything do with Unix scripting. I will rather use $var =~ s/<find-regex>/<replace-regex>/g on any day than use Python's .compile .match .group and all those tens of API's to do simple tasks what can be achieved in a line of Perl code.

Need of the hour isn't redesigning the CPAN or the packaging system. Its really to educate users as to how Perl can be helpful to them. Its about writing good books, like the Modern Perl Book and make them famous. To give you an idea about how bad the situation is- A good part of everyday OO programmers in the world today, don't even know something like Moose exists. Even if they were to know, there is nothing like a nice pdf friendly manual to tell them how it can be use full to them. Compare this to something like Python or Java where very elaborate manuals exist on how awesome their stuff is.

Also advocacy involves going to programming/tech forums and showing solutions in Perl. To give you an example nearly every thread on Hacker news which has a need for a program gets posted with Python snippets. Compare this with like say the early days of Perl and the 90's where the forums/mailing lists were full of people like Tom Christiansen and others showing solutions in Perl. The 90's were also full of people writing real awesome articles and circulating them on how Perl can solve their problems easily.

Back in the day comp.lang.<insert-some-list-here> existed where people would have golf contest or some sysadmin joined into show how pipe kungfu can be avoided with one line of Perl. These those have been replaced with forums like Stackoverflow.

Also CPAN is a killer feature, but unfortunately even if you are awesome people get used it and sooner or later it no longer remains awesome. Its like eating an apple everyday, first it feels very good then - slowly it becomes boring. Its called 'law of diminishing utility'. Python was first all about 'Readeability matters' but now they have moved to stuff like Twisted, Django. Those are the new killer apps. The thing is Killer apps themselves don't remain constant.

Lastly Perl 6 needs to come out soon.

Languages like Python and Ruby can today run on multiple VM's, they have lesser technical debt and backwards incompatible problems than Perl.

Beyond all this Perl 6 problem is something like promising kid an Ice Cream and then going back on the promise. It creates a lot of disappointment within the community.