On Nov 10, 2008, at 3:46 AM, André Warnier wrote:
- the rate of new people coming into the community has been
declining.
The responses there are indeed a bit scary. It feels like we're a
dying breed.
I believe this is to a large extent a "marketing issue" for perl in
general, and mod_perl by extension, with regard to the younger
programmers generation. At least in various European countries I
know, perl is not really being taught in programming schools as a
"serious" programming language for applications. These young people
have all heard the name, but seem to consider it as a powerful but
somewhat messy scripting language to create system administration
scripts.
Frankly, I think that a lot of people thing that Apache/mod_perl is
much too big and complex. They tend to prefer small single-process
servers, like mongrel, running on lots of ports. FastCGI has many
fans, as well. Even AxKit ships with its own fast and light Web
server. For adherents of the fast and light server (handle HTTP and
get out of my way!), Apache/mod_perl just seems like overkill.
To a certain degree, Apache/mod_perl is a victim of the success of
HTTP. It's fairly easy to implement a new HTTP server, so there are a
lot of them, and many are easy to use and extremely fast. If all
you're interested in is serving a Rails or Catalyst app, Apache/
mod_perl starts to seem like much too big a beast.
Personally, I'm still a fan. But there are a lot of other attractive
options out there, and, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this
thread, folks who like and use mod_perl seem more interested in
getting their jobs done than in evangelizing or marketing. Can't say I
blame them.
Best,
David
