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

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Ali M." <tclwarrior at gmail.com>
> When Catalyst is not chosen I personally believe it the combination of
> two things
> 1. Perl is no longer perceived as an easy language, or language that
> make development easier.

More exactly,, Perl is considered a language hard to learn, that creates a code hard to maintain, a language that uses a strange OOP style (because I guess there are no books for Perl beginners that teach about Moose or Mouse), a language which is too flexible and because of this it is not prefered by the large teams of programmers because each of them could have a different style.

> 2. Catalyst perceivably doesn't offer enough added value for
> developers who are not that much into Perl
>    to make the sacrifice and use Perl anyway.

If the programmers are "not that much into perl", this means that they don't know how to use DBIx::Class and Catalyst and possibly other few modules which are usually used by Catalyst developers, and in that case they can't understand the power of Catalyst.

If Catalyst wants to compete with RoR or other frameworks, it should be as easy to install as those frameworks, and the simple apps should be also very easy to create.

The comparisons between web frameworks are not based on the number of the requests they serve, or on the number of database tables they manage, or on the number of backend servers they are installed on, but on the number of web sites that use those frameworks, so those comparisons might show that there are 100 sites that use RoR and only 5 that use Catalyst, but don't tell that 3 from those 5 sites that use Catalyst have 3 times more visitors than all those 100 sites that use RoR.
And of course, the conclusion is that RoR is much better.

I think that the success of other languages, especially Python is also due to the fact that they support better Windows than Perl.
WxPython is better developed than WxPerl, there are even screen readers that interact with the GUI of the OS in Windows and Linux, and finally... the number of programmers for Windows is bigger than the number of programmers for Linux.
Most Perl programmers use to consider good to publicly despise Windows and those who use Windows, and also consider that Perl is a language for the web, while those who use Python or even Ruby consider them very good languages for creating programs with a desktop GUI.

PerlScript as a client language, or one which is used in .hta applications or Windows Scripting Host, is pretty hard to use if we compare it with VBScript or JScript, and even if we can say that Perl can be used in places where other languages can't be used, practicly it can't be used really successfully. Of course, there are no manuals or training materials for using PerlScript, which are newer than 7 or 8 years.

Even on Symbian, Python is better developed than Perl, which practicly I don't think it is really used on the mobile phones.
I've seen a few persons that say that yes, there are many perl developers that create modules for CPAN, which is great, but the core Perl development team is probably very thin, Perl 6 is not ready yet, while Python 3 was launched and it has a great and powerful core team.

Python is sustained by Gmail and Sun, which create programs that use it, but Perl, even though it is used by big companies like Oracle, just use it, and don't seem to sustain its development.

I think these disadvantages also influence the potential users to think that even the Python frameworks are better, which is not true.

Octavian