[Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst

Paul Makepeace paulm at paulm.com
Fri Dec 1 03:23:14 GMT 2006


On 12/1/06, Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior <acid06 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> wrote:
> > > Thats a bit short sighted, without new developers learning Perl you'll
> > > have a lack sooner or later.
> >
> > For example, look at PHP's community.  Huge! ... but absolutely no
> > competent core / module developers.  Numbers != quality.
>
> One thing you should use as a thermometer for technology is wether
> something is being used or not in a significant scale outside the US
> and main countries of Europe.
>
> This may seem irrelevant, but software development companies such as
> the ones that exist here in Brazil usually take a much more
> conservative approach towards technology choice. Hence the lack of
> Perl shops around here. What really bothers me, however, is Python
> shops are thriving and recently Ruby (with Rails) has been the first
> dynamic language to overcome the "enterprise" barrier around here.

It doesn't surprise me python is thriving. It's a great language: easy
to pick up, regular, "simple", works.

I love perl and it's my main programming language. At the same time I
realise I have put a huge amount of time into learning it. There's
another guy on one of my team's who's a PHP programmer - we have a
site that's half PHP and half catalyst. He keeps mentioning learning
catalyst and I thought "what if I had to go from PHP to
Perl+Catalyst?" and, knowing what I know, it was a scary thought. The
learning curve is immense and daunting.

I read "Diving into Python" more or less over a weekend and am merrily
writing python like it's no big deal. Sure, I'm a programmer and am
already introduced to all of the concepts python knows about. But
still, there I am doing most of what I can do in perl in another
language within a far far shorter time.

As for PHP its barrier to entry is so low perl will never ever compete
in that space until it can match both the simplicity of the language
and ease of installation and deployment. Syntax and other niceties
are, frankly, irrelevant. (And similarly any bleating about python's
whitespace rules has automatically removed themselves from useful
contribution to the discussion, unless they make it particularly witty
:-)

> This situation creates a vicious cycle where people won't learn Perl
> because the demand for Perl developers is small and this will ends up
> hurting the still existing Perl shops.

Yes, ignore growth at your peril.

Perl 5 is a lost cause, IMO. It's just too hard, too crufty, too
weighed down by years of negative perception. Perl 6 is our only hope.
(And I sincerely hope they call it something different from Perl 6)

Paul



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