From: "Joe Schaefer" <joe_schae...@yahoo.com>
A contribution to a *community* would be to offer gratis advice on a
mailing list, ostensibly to help the community reach its objectives.
Nothing I see in this thread looks like a contribution to the mod_perl
community, sorry.
The mod_perl community is also made of those who want to use mod_perl, and
if somebody put questions regarding mod_perl, we should try to help him, no
matter if he is interested about technical faces of mod_perl, or if he is
interested to know how obsolete or modern it is, or if he is interested to
know how many mod_perl programmers are available.
"Die" is just an expression that wants to tell that the language is not
used by
more and more programmers, but by fewer.
Usage statistics are irrelevent to the vitality of a language. What's
relevant
to the perl community is something like how many module maintainers have
abandoned
their codebases. Do you have any information about how many modules are
on
CPAN that are no longer supported? And to bring it back to mod_perl, how
many
of those are Apache modules?
Nope, but I know that WxPython is much better developed than WxPerl, that
Python can be used under Symbian, that Python can work better together with
Java virtual machine, that Python is better than Perl for some tasks, and I
gave an example of 2 screen readers made in python, one for Linux and one
for Windows.
I also know that even the Perl programmers prefer more and more fastcgi,
because it has some advantages.
I have never used fastcgi or fcgid, but only mod_perl, but this doesn't mean
that we should present only the good parts of mod_perl and perl.
Usage statistics are very relevant. In the christian part of the world, in
churches the old greek and latin are considered great languages, with a big
history, and some consider them more important languages for the world's
civilisation than English or Spanish, but this is because for what those
persons is important, those languages could be important, however for the
rest of the world those languages are considered only dead languages, even
if they have a longer history than English or Spanish.
If perl will become better and better but for less and less users, it would
become an alive language like latin.
If we want to be more on-topic, it would be interesting to compare mod_perl
with mod_php and mod_python and find if the other Apache modules have
advantages, or why they are more and more used.
And the number of current users is not so important as the rate of increase
or decrease in the number of users and sites that use them.
If there are say 1 million sites that use mod_perl but only 100 thousand
that use mod_python, however the number of web sites that use mod_perl
increases with 1% each year (or even decreases), and the number of sites
that use mod_python increases with 10% each year, then the future doesn't
sound very well for mod_perl.
If this presumption is true or not, it would be helpful for us to know in
any case.
Octavian
