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I'm a non-perl guy working in a very Perl heavy company, so hatred of it is quite well justified, and based on discussions with many of my coworkers, it seems the Perl community doesn't want to understand why the rest of the world has moved on and has no interest in Perl anymore (resulting in this kind of bullshit "please, please, please pay attention to me!!!")

--The language sucks - yes it does. Usually the KISS principle is thought of as a good thing, except in the Perl language where nothing is ever simple or straightforward. There's 10 ways of doing every single little thing, and no two developers do it the same way. It is not a language welcoming of new developers, so as more schools and companies switch/abandon, I can only imagine it declining further.

-- it offers nothing new or exciting to most developers. If you're starting a new project or company and you already know another similar language (say, Python), Perl has nothing to offer. While it was innovative new 10-15 years ago, most of the good has long been assimilated in other languages.

-- real world perl sucks. a standard line amongst Perl monks is "you can do that in Perl!". Exceptions, objects, web frameworks, clean code, etc. You name it, you can do it in perl. Except in the real world, hardly anyone ever does, so Real World perl is as terrible as people fear. Python's strong community standards, OTOH, pretty much make sure you're almost always writing decent code.

As an example, I picked up both Django and Catalyst over the last year. With Django (python newbie), I immediately picked up decorators and started using them - both the built-in ones and my own. Its simple - just syntactic sugar for a function wrapper.

Catalyst OTOH, tries something vaguely similar using method attributes - except their are neither as powerful nor as simple/clear and despite many years of perl experience on the team, few people had seen them used, used them themselves, nor did they have a solid idea of how they work.

My point is, when you make something simple and accessible, it'll get used. When all you do is repeat "you can do that" and wave your hands about, you'll get ignored and eventually forgotten.




I work with this fellow so keep in mind there's history here between us on the subject. :)

"the language sucks" -- Is very much in the eye of the beholder. Perl works the way I think just as jQuery does. As for not being welcoming, I think you'll find perlmonks.org to be a huge welcoming community.

"it offers nothing new" -- I'm sorry, but if you already know Python or Ruby why would you switch anyhow? There's a big time investment in becoming really good at a language. No reason to switch when you have languages that can just get things done. I'm not even sure what you mean by "new". Perl is 22 years old now. Python and Ruby are both around 15. What's new here? I also find this "new" comment hilarious in light of the Python feature freeze. Things like Moose and Catalyst are new(ish) to the Perl community and they're doing great things. Further, CPAN is expanding at a huge rate, more than ever before. There's ALWAYS new stuff there.

"real world perl sucks" -- Real world code sucks period. And I do clean code. There are standards in Perl and they do evolve. You need to engage in the community a little as I think everyone should with their languages.

What is fairly obvious to me is that Python fits very well with how YOUR brain works. Perl fits very well with how MY brain works.

Just because it don't jive with you, doesn't mean it doesn't jive with others.

'Scuse me. I have a mod_perl2 handler to write.


"Perl works the way I think just as jQuery does"

Never ever say this again.


why not?


You're right. attributes are a bit weird if you don't know perl.

Which is why we've been working on http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?CatalystX::Declare.

The Perl5 community does try and listen to the rest of the world. Unfortunately many of the people we'd like to be listening to make the sort of comments you just did rather than providing constructive criticism that we can effectively address.

The reason for shouting "pay attention" is that many people aren't even bothering to look because they're still stuck with an image of Perl5 based on ten year old information, and we'd at least like to be hated for what we are now rather than what we were back at the end of the last century.

If that upsets you, you're welcome to continue to not pay attention - but we've been getting lots of useful feedback from the people who have and so far as I'm concerned that makes it all worth while.




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