[Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web development platform contestand Perl / Catalyst

[J. Shirley]

On 12/1/06, Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 04:43:03PM -0200, Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior wrote:
> > On 12/1/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> wrote:
> > >Perl.  Is.  Not.  Dead.
> >
> > No one *here* is stating that Perl is really dead. Otherwise we'd all
> > be undead zombies from hell or something like that. Anyone who's
> > inside the Perl community knows it's alive and kicking and that most
> > of Perl's "widely known problems" are actually FUD. The real problem
> > is that it currently seems to be an ever shrinking community.
>
> Unfortunately, FUD drives the real world.  How often do projects get
> written in Perl or Ruby or Python because it is the best choice vs.
> what the managers think is the best choice?
>
> What's the goal?  Open up the paper and see lots of listing for Perl
> jobs?  That managers pick Perl/Catalyst over another solution?  That
> Perl is popular enough to drive up demand for good perl programmers?
>

On the other side of the coin, my company is actively hiring right now
and we've been flooded by people who have that same perception and
poor Perl knowledge.  To the point that we've had candidates inform us
it would be highly advantageous to rewrite certain parts in C (of all
languages).

Perl has always had a stigma attached to it that it was a hackish
language.  This comes from perl4, in my opinion.  When Perl 5 came
out, it turned Perl into a language that can actually be used for
larger projects, and used very well.  I believe Perl 6 will take the
simplicity that Perl offers, as well as the capability and put a new
face on it that will help justify the time to give Perl a second look.

Perl is not dead.  However, Perl is not a language many people feel
comfortable putting their career on the line.  A very good friend of
mine, who is a brilliant programmer, abandoned Perl for Java because
of job security.  I'm hoping to win him back to the Perl side, but
he's not alone.  Why bother risking the safety of your career because
you want to hang on to what most people consider an out-of-date and
less capable language?  There is very little incentive to do so.
Right now it is more beneficial for developers to focus on other
languages, because there are more jobs out there.  Regardless of
"death", that part is true and easily substantiated.

My opinion on changing that is to simply do very cool things in Perl,
get people who want to work on cool things, and just get it done.
Things like plat_forms help, as well, and I hope the Catalyst team
does very well.

Hopefully these things help contribute in someway to promote the idea
that Perl is a good language.

-J.