Unfortunately in 2000 the Perl developers lost touch with the real world and started to develop the perfect scripting language, Perl 6. They're still at it, apparently. Meanwhile Perl 5 has become hopelessly outdated. It lacks elegant OO and a good web framework, to name only a few downsides.
— Steven Reiz, Groovy is the new Perl / Java / ...
Since 2000, the Perl developers have also developed (to my knowledge) the most advanced and comprehensive language testing ecosystem in the world.
Oh, and (also to my knowledge) the largest collection of reusable and redistributable software components in existence (though admittedly, it's only grown tremendously a few times over since 2000, having begun a few years before).
That's not to mention a few other interesting pieces of technology, such as Moose, lexically overridable grammars, roles, metaoperators, parametrized roles, and did I mention you can use all of them in working software today?
Its syntax is so compact (there is some truth in the joke that every randomly typed string of characters is a valid Perl program) that maintainability suffers.
Oh. Oh, snap. This one's clearly done serious research.
Re:To be honest...
chromatic on 2009-05-09T17:27:16
I can believe "irrelevant in our local context", if all of his deployment and monitoring infrastructure assumes (or requires) the presence of a JVM and its ecosystem, but sometimes the best response to willful ignorance masquerading as helpful advice is very specific mockery.
Re:New target set up - fire away
chromatic on 2009-05-12T06:57:12
Thanks for responding.
I don't care if you like Groovy or Grails. If they're appropriate for your business, great. If Perl's not appropriate, that's fine too.
I do care, very much, if you propagate myths and baseless rumors about projects I work on. Well-researched and well-reasoned discussions are fine. I don't believe you've said anything more than "I don't like Perl" and "I don't think it can work."
I have a lot of respect for the Perl community and CPAN.
I'm not sure you understand either one.
You've changed your subtext from from "Sigils are HARD to READ!" to "There's more than one way to do things, and that MUST make it hard to get things done."
I believe that's still superficial criticism. It's also wrong. The CPAN is a great example of TIMTOWTDI. If your subtext were true -- that Perl is dying because people are confused -- then the CPAN wouldn't be growing. Other languages would have bigger and better repositories and ecosystems.
I can't name one. You can't either -- especially not in a language with a central management structure (the kind required to pull off the coup you imply Perl needs, where thousands of volunteers all receive new assignments to work on only the officially sanctioned projects).
(Try that line on LKML sometime, for kicks.)
Oh, and Moose and Mouse aren't competing systems either, as the official documentation in the latter link explains. As well, Moose and the standard Perl object system are compatible.
We may take TIMTOWTDI seriously, but Perl is, by design, a very broad church. Look at the
Test::namespace on the CPAN, for example: hundreds of modules, 99% of which can all work together seamlessly in the same program. We didn't achieve this through some five-year plan from a central planning office. We achieved this the same way we achieve everything in Perl: rough consensus and iteration around working code.
