On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:34 AM, Mitchell N Charity <mchar...@vendian.org> wrote:
> [ Lots of good stuff snipped ] Wow... thanks for putting these thoughts together. This was some very interesting critical insight from a very different project perspective than mine. My own point of view is that of a typical, "practical" Perl hacker whose community involvement hasn't gone deeper than applications of the language, versus deconstruction and improvement of the language itself. So I've been with the vast crowd who waited for a file named perl-6_0_0.tar.gz to appear in the early part of the 2000s, stopped hearing any clear news about an impeding release, and eventually got bored and forgot about it. In my case, recent developments have got me paying attention again, but I can't blame the rest of the software-development world -- including, I imagine, most Perl programmers -- to consider Perl 6 a forgotten failure. Certainly, if a project has a dearth of developers, it's not going to have much of a PR presence, either... Anyway, when I apply the "skunkworks" label, this is my attempt to summarize in a sentence how Perl 6 has changed its focus over the years, and how I, as a daily grinder of Perl 5 code, benefit from it. I hope it doesn't come across as sniffingly condescending! > And then? Is it any easier now than it was a decade ago to find people > to do perlguts maintenance? Is perl any less an increasingly obsolete > and dying language? (Seriously - Moose was having an impact some years > back, but I'm no longer following perl closely enough to know.)[1] I don't know from perlguts, so I'm not the implied target of your question (and I would be curious to hear answers from those who are). But just the same: Perl -- from my perspective -- has enjoyed a small renaissance quite recently by way of the Catalyst web framework (more correctly: the Catalyst / Moose / DBIC web-development triumvirate). I discovered Catalyst three years ago at a client's site, and it made me fall in love with the language and its community all over again. By way of Catalyst, I have been buying brand-new books about Perl, spawning a handful of new Perl-based projects every year (several of which pay my bills), and teaching Perl to programmers already experienced in other languages. I find myself willingly hanging out on IRC channels dedicated to specific Perl modules' discussion, for god's sake. I haven't had this much enthusiasm for (or income from) Perl hacking in quite some time. I'm no language evangelist, and I don't know how far this killer-app experiences are reflected across the landscape. But as far as I'm concerned, Catalyst has given Perl one recent shot in the arm, and in a field that has always been one of its home territories. And the constant chatter in those IRC channels suggests I'm not alone in finding it so. > [1] http://blogs.perl.org/users/jt_smith/2010/04/the-second-age-of-perl.html via HN today. Ha ha... only noticed that link _after_ blorting out all the tl;dr above. And it doesn't mention Catalyst once! ( I am tempted to also point at the uptick in job postings, versus same-month 2009, on http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats, but given the up-n-down(-n-up) economy it's probably not a very good standalone measure. ) -- Jason McIntosh http://jmac.org • j...@jmac.org • @JmacDotOrg _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
