4 ms·

It's a joke pointing out how Perl has fallen behind in the marketplace. I've written as much Perl as your average bear, to see it lose out has been sad.

by toddh 16y ago

chromatic 16y ago
By which objective measurements has Perl "fallen behind in the marketplace"? TIOBE is nonsense and noise, and the State of the Computer Book Marketplace has flaws that would make a first year business student blush. I know there's some nebulous buzz factor, but I'm asking about verifiable measurements.
- phaylon 16y ago
  It might be worth noting that Perl is simply stronger than it appears. The community has very easy ways to communicate information, since Perl has a very good infrastructure. CPAN is easy and doesn't distinguish between rank or other privileges; there's RSS feeds for about everything and you can get a large crowd simply by releasing; Many forms of bugs that are dependent on architecture/environment can be caught by automated testing, or by community members reporting their installation logs through their CPAN client; We still use mailing lists (some of which are closed) because they're easy to manage and are well suited for long big-traffic discussions; we use IRC because of its advantages, and many early developments happen on irc.perl.org, separated from the rest of the IRC world (this isn't bad, just a simple reason); We didn't do forums and online communities that well in the past, but it's starting. There is PerlMonks, but it was always very Perl-specific. Blogging has been adopted by the community a lot, and you can feel its impact when you see more and more people asking about the projects the community enjoys the most at the time (Moose, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla & Co). I heard "Yea, we still make heavy use of Perl in our company, but we didn't follow the community, because isn't Perl on a decline?" many times at CeBit this year. So it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Overcoming it isn't an easy task, but we're heading in the right direction and there's a couple of very smart people working on it.

It's a joke pointing out how Perl has fallen behind in the marketplace. I've written as much Perl as your average bear, to see it lose out has been sad.

by toddh 16y ago

It's a joke pointing out how Perl has fallen behind in the marketplace. I've written as much Perl as your average bear, to see it lose out has been sad.

chromatic 16y ago

By which objective measurements has Perl "fallen behind in the marketplace"? TIOBE is nonsense and noise, and the State of the Computer Book Marketplace has flaws that would make a first year business student blush. I know there's some nebulous buzz factor, but I'm asking about verifiable measurements.

phaylon 16y ago
It might be worth noting that Perl is simply stronger than it appears. The community has very easy ways to communicate information, since Perl has a very good infrastructure. CPAN is easy and doesn't distinguish between rank or other privileges; there's RSS feeds for about everything and you can get a large crowd simply by releasing; Many forms of bugs that are dependent on architecture/environment can be caught by automated testing, or by community members reporting their installation logs through their CPAN client; We still use mailing lists (some of which are closed) because they're easy to manage and are well suited for long big-traffic discussions; we use IRC because of its advantages, and many early developments happen on irc.perl.org, separated from the rest of the IRC world (this isn't bad, just a simple reason); We didn't do forums and online communities that well in the past, but it's starting. There is PerlMonks, but it was always very Perl-specific. Blogging has been adopted by the community a lot, and you can feel its impact when you see more and more people asking about the projects the community enjoys the most at the time (Moose, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla & Co). I heard "Yea, we still make heavy use of Perl in our company, but we didn't follow the community, because isn't Perl on a decline?" many times at CeBit this year. So it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Overcoming it isn't an easy task, but we're heading in the right direction and there's a couple of very smart people working on it.