The start of this thread is some FUD raised not by the actual thread starter, but a customer expressing concerns about web development and web frameworks here:

Hi and sorry for the provocative title of my post :)

One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP app we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some buzzword-compliant consultants they are expressing concerns that the app's underlying technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are becoming obsolete. They feel that a web application framework must have 'rails' or some other buzzword in its name.

But their main argument is that perl is declining as a web developement language. Also they rightly feel that competent perl developers are becoming harder to find.

What arguements could I use to address these concerns and convince them that their initial investement in perl is still safe and won't be obsolete in 10 years?

The client's local developers (who maintain the app we've built) feel that mason gives too much freedom to write messy code and badly structure a web app.

Indeed mason has very little constraints, maybe just slightly more than straight modperl. So it requires experienced, self-disciplined devs, which are few and far between.

So my second question is, what perl web development framework should we recommend to our client? Catalyst looks like a winner, but maybe there are others?

Thanks for your insights,

--

This is not really about Perl in the "jobmarket" - just in web development and how it seems to "be behind" against all the cool buzzwordy frameworks out there.

I have some ten years learning and experience invested in perl, and at the moment I'd basically agree with your consultants. I haven't been hired solely for perl since 2003 (it was a web development gig) and I was musing just yesterday that I probably never would be again. I'm just a dinosaur in a world of fleet-footed MVC-wielding agile mammals ;) So I agree with your consultants: although perl is far from finished, it's not ideal for web dev work.

Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation (which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays nicely with your HTML coders.

Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)

You should try CGI::Application (Titanium) - it's simple. For Perl code cleaning try Perl::Critic and perltidy.

One of the posters (Lupe Christoph) turns to job board statistics to show that Perl is doing okay, but I think this is a poor measure. The ideal language for popularity in job board stats would be a legacy language; one that is attracting few new developers but is vital to some part of operations. Sadly I think Perl is headed there, if it isn't there already.

I've worked with lots of young developers and they always know PHP, and they never know Perl. Lots of people put Perl on their resume but it isn't deep knowledge, it's just enough to script a cronjob or whatever.

You can argue all you want, but if the kids aren't learning it, your language is dead.

You might not be able to get a job exclusively doing Perl hacking, but if you know Perl you make your life a lot easier. My wife is an IT manager and even she found Perl tremendously useful, beacuse she sometimes has to bang files into different formats or weed through gigantic log files dispersed on different servers.

That's equally true of all the scripting languages though. Python or Ruby will handle those jobs just as well.

Or Haskell. (With a little coercion.)

Perl and, surpringly, Korn shell are still widely used through the financial IT industry.

If I read that search correctly, it's saying that the number of threads about mod_perl has declined.

That symptom is also affected by:

- increasing maturity of mod_perl (fewer problems) - a decrease in apache/apache2 modperl/mod_perl2 discussions as apache2/mod_perl2 has become dominant over that time period