On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Octavian Râsnita <orasn...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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 > I do see Joe's point. The question I would ask though is "what harm has this mail trail done?". It has generated a large amount of interest, even if the opinion to backed-by-objective-evidence ratio has been a little high at times. If someone isn't interested then surely they just won't follow the discussion?
