[Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development

[Ashley]

On Feb 15, 2009, at 1:04 AM, Dan Dascalescu wrote:

>> First:  Perl jobs are not decreasing.  While there is not a ton of  
>> 'Buzz'
>> around perl anymore... If you look at actual jobs stats:
>>
>> http://tiny.cc/kkcCM
>>
>> Perl is above all the others by some margin.
>
> Short version: that graph is misleading. Click the "Relative" link.


You had some great points below this but I think this one isn't.
The relative graph is the misleading one and something so put
in print and in conversations with tech managers. The relative
graph makes it look like there are tons of RoR jobs. There
aren't. Job seekers who need a job now outweigh those that like
to gamble on trends and getting hired in the future. A lot of
devs, most(?), today are not CS guys. It's not just the kit
they'd be investing in but the language. It's not Cat or RoR,
it's Perl or Ruby. Perl is simply a better choice for tech work
if you're only able to handle one and I personally don't
see that changing for a long time.

Maybe more important than a user case is a dev case. I've been
brought into two projects to do Catalyst and the big concern in
both was that there weren't enough developers who knew the
framework.

And while others have made good points there were many that
weren't so hot. Using a big company as an example of a place
that picks the best is ridiculous; their size and bureaucracy
often mean they can't. When I was at Amazon I watched
them burn millions of dollars on dead end projects because
they picked the wrong tool for the job. They picked Java
to create a highly agile customer service tool. It was an
unmitigated disaster that was abandoned for a Perl rewrite
18 months after it was still too slow, too buggy, and
incomplete. It's my understanding, though I wasn't there
for this one, that they did a project with Ruby to do
employee reviews where the whole thing was ditched for
the legacy version the day it was to go live because it
didn't work outside the dev env. There's some good FUD:
Java and Ruby lead the failure of Amazon.com projects
and the loss of millions of dollars.

I liked everything Jay said about it. My own 2¢ would be
that we should each take as much time to make Cat
developer-friendly (docs, examples, blog posts) as we
can; and some of you are doing a great job at this already.
We have a great kit, a great community, and the more obvious
and accessible it is, the more we ensure continued success.

-Ashley