On 02/06/2011 21:50, gvim wrote: > Considering the amount of development you've done on Perl web frameworks over > the years isn't this tantamount to having given up on Perl, at least for web > development?
Yes and no. I've moved from being more of a developer to being more of a user. Perl is a fantastic language for developers. It has a great culture for developers. We're all brilliant at producing tools which other developers can pick up and do really great stuff with. Perl is wonderful if I want to write my own web framework, or construct my own CMS on top of one of the hundreds of Perl web frameworks which already exist. But these days I don't. I don't have infinite amounts of time to enjoy fiddling with programming. I just want to get stuff done. Most of the time, I want applications, not libraries. Perl culture is wonderful if I want to build my own CMS, but not all that wonderful if I just want to use one, because we're all writing for other developers and not necessarily for end users. When it comes to a fairly customizable site that I can throw up pretty quickly and start editing content on, then Drupal blows away... well, I don't even know what. Bricolage? WebGUI? Moveable Type is probably the closest equivalent, and it isn't particularly equivalent. Yes, sure, I could write one, and I haven't, so in that sense, yeah, I've given up on Perl. But the reason I haven't written one is that Drupal does what I want, and I don't actually care what technology it's built on so long as it works, and to imagine that I ought to reinvent that particular wheel just out of some strange loyalty to Perl is to miss the point that a programming language is a tool, not an end in itself - once again ignoring what the end user cares about. I still code, and when I code, I still code in Perl. So in that sense, no, I haven't given up on Perl. But at the same time, I'm not remotely interested in making Perl the greatest all-singing all-dancing language there is with nice carbon copies of all the other applications out there; I'm *happy* to use Perl in a tool-smithing, glom-modules-together way because that's what it's good at. *Really* good at. If I am developing new code, I find that really useful. I mean it, Perl does have a great culture for developers. But for end-user stuff, I'll use whatever tools I find available to get the job done. There is, after all, more than one way to do it.