Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
> Having only one team for Perl is quite bad, > especially since one of the organizers happens to be the iX magazine > (http://www.heise.de/ix/), > which has a big influence in the german speaking world. :/ Today I was in a meeting with one of Germany's top twenty internet agencies to speak about the future of our (home-brewed Perl-based) community app. I spoke to the person in charge of technology who of course tried to persuade me that Java and .Net/C# is the way to go. Even worse, he was convinced that Perl has no object- orientation features at all! He was surprised when I told him about the CPAN and Perl's flexible object capabilities. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. One of Germany's most successful web portals serving several hundred million page impressions per month with Perl recently started hiring Java developers. I hate to say this, but Perl is really lacking some sort of marketing. To my mind Catalyst could be the new killer-app that has the potential to resurrect our favorite language. But not if we can't get the word out. This is really frustrating. Catalyst's website is one big mess. Go to the wiki section and you get gazillions of links on one page. Click on documentation and you receive ugly POD pages. This is just not up to standards set by other frameworks. Don't get me wrong: The content and documentation is better than most other frameworks but the presentation just sucks. I recently met another fellow perl dude and we're currently brainstorming what has to change to make Perl and the Catalyst project more appealing to the average CTO, technical lead, dude-who-is-in-charge- but-thinks-perl-is-dead :) Sorry, had to get this off of my mind ... -- Tobias P.S. I read that the upcoming issue of the iX magazine will feature an article about web development with Catalyst ... ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Tobias Kremer wrote: Today I was in a meeting with one of Germany's top twenty internet agencies to speak about the future of our (home-brewed Perl-based) community app. I spoke to the person in charge of technology who of course tried to persuade me that Java and .Net/C# is the way to go. Even worse, he was convinced that Perl has no object- orientation features at all! He was surprised when I told him about the CPAN and Perl's flexible object capabilities. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. Yes, thats quite common sadly and caused only by lack of marketing. One of Germany's most successful web portals serving several hundred million page impressions per month with Perl recently started hiring Java developers. It's so absurd when you think about it, from script language back to compiled mess? The opposite should be the case! We really have to start learning from the Ruby folks, take a look at these two books, it's pure marketing genius. From Java To Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know (http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_j2r/index.html) Rails For Java Developers (http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_r4j/index.html) I hate to say this, but Perl is really lacking some sort of marketing. To my mind Catalyst could be the new killer-app that has the potential to resurrect our favorite language. But not if we can't get the word out. This is really frustrating. Catalyst's website is one big mess. Go to the wiki section and you get gazillions of links on one page. Click on documentation and you receive ugly POD pages. This is just not up to standards set by other frameworks. Don't get me wrong: The content and documentation is better than most other frameworks but the presentation just sucks. I recently met another fellow perl dude and we're currently brainstorming what has to change to make Perl and the Catalyst project more appealing to the average CTO, technical lead, dude-who-is-in-charge- but-thinks-perl-is-dead :) I completely agree, but you don't get (good) marketing for free, a company or The Perl Foundation would have to invest money in it. Take a look at Java, PHP and Ruby, all the marketing initiatives can be traced back to a few smart companies. (Please take a few minutes and think about it before flaming me, thanks) P.S. I read that the upcoming issue of the iX magazine will feature an article about web development with Catalyst ... Just seen that too, will be fun to read. (http://www.heise.de/ix/vorschau.shtml) :) -- sebastian ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Sebastian Riedel wrote:
> Tobias Kremer wrote:
> Take a look at Java, PHP and Ruby, all the marketing initiatives can be
> traced back to a few smart companies.
What has the marketing gotten the community? PHP and Ruby both suck in
comparison to Perl (features / unicode / modules / speed / knowing wtf
=== really means), despite the fact that money is being poured into both
of those languages by apparently-profitable companies. It sounds to me
like they're spending all their money creatively lying about the facts,
whereas the p(?:[56]|arrot)-porters are actually improving their languages.
I for one don't really care if perl is "number one". It's already
better -- what more do you really want?
BTW, here's the real problem with Perl. It's too hard for dumb people
to learn. PHP's "everything is a scalar" and "everything is a function"
is great. You just slap a bunch of functions together and you're done!
You have an unreadable and unmaintainable piece of crap, but who cares;
you're done! You gone done made a website thar!
Now speaking as !(a dumb person) (ok ok, arguments about this off-list
please ;), I prefer Perl's syntax because I can say what I mean and have
the *compiler* figure out how to do things. [1] Plus, there are
powerful features for me to draw upon and exploit -- MI, functional
elements (map / grep / sort {BLOCK} ...), closures, anonymous
subroutines, references, data structures that make sense to someone with
more than 15 minutes programming experience, etc. Perl will never win
the language war because most people don't understand why it's good, and
never will. (Ruby is "popular" because of 37signals' massive cash
outlay, and because it's different enough to excite people by "being
different". Throwing away 30 years of what I know about programming is
a great idea! It's fuuunnn!)
[1] PHP example -- look at preg_split, str_split, strtok, and explode.
What a freaking nightmare. That is, unless your brain doesn't work, in
which case it's "cool to have fun toys to choose from". The manual says
which to use in which case, and by reading that and picking "the right
one", the programmer gets to think "I'm smart, I'm OPTIMIZING!" In
reality, the programmer is doing the work of an if statement, but hey...
"ZOMG I'M OPTIMIZING!"
I mention this because perl has one function, join, that does all of
these (except strtok, which you can do with a plain regex). In PHP, you
have to use a different function to "optimize" for the plain-string
case. In Perl, if your regex isn't really a regex (i.e. /foo/), then
perl can optimize for this and pick a faster algorithm. [/1]
Anyway, preaching to the choir here, so enough :)
Regards,
Jonathan Rockway
--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;
___
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Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Tobias Kremer wrote: I hate to say this, but Perl is really lacking some sort of marketing. To my mind Catalyst could be the new killer-app that has the potential to resurrect our favorite language. But not if we can't get the word out. This is really frustrating. Catalyst's website is one big mess. Go to the wiki section and you get gazillions of links on one page. Click on documentation and you receive ugly POD pages. This is just not up to standards set by other frameworks. Don't get me wrong: The content and documentation is better than most other frameworks but the presentation just sucks. I recently met another fellow perl dude and we're currently brainstorming what has to change to make Perl and the Catalyst project more appealing to the average CTO, technical lead, dude-who-is-in-charge- but-thinks-perl-is-dead :) Then subscribe to the catalyst-dev list and join in the discussions already started by the marketing team for working towards this! There's already an active effort going on to improve this stuff, put the energy you just spent complaining towards working with the guys doing so next time :) ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Off Topic, but my favorite thing about Perl is testing. (Stop laughing). I'm very fond of the fact that perl just gets out of my way and let's me test odd things easily (ala mocking, symbol tables/anon subs, etc). Trying to unit test in things that need to be mocked in .NET is painful, even with the mock object classes. It's their way (mock a class, or use interfaces, but not subclasses) or the highway. In perl, I can just get it done. /me crawls back in his hole. -=Chris signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Jonathan Rockway wrote: Sebastian Riedel wrote: Tobias Kremer wrote: Take a look at Java, PHP and Ruby, all the marketing initiatives can be traced back to a few smart companies. What has the marketing gotten the community? PHP and Ruby both suck in comparison to Perl (features / unicode / modules / speed / knowing wtf === really means), despite the fact that money is being poured into both of those languages by apparently-profitable companies. It sounds to me like they're spending all their money creatively lying about the facts, whereas the p(?:[56]|arrot)-porters are actually improving their languages. You just gave a perfect example why Perl needs marketing. :) It is better for a lot of things, but the problem is nobody outside the Perl community knows! (As for Ruby, they are absolutely aware of their weaknesses and work very hard on fixing them. YARV the new virtual machine has just been merged into the ruby repository.) I for one don't really care if perl is "number one". It's already better -- what more do you really want? Thats a bit short sighted, without new developers learning Perl you'll have a lack sooner or later. -- sebastian ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Very few people know how to write compilers, but that doesn't stop GCC (and python/perl/ruby/forth/bf/haskell/foo/bar/baz) from existing. It only takes 2 or 3 people to work on a "big" project, so as long as there are 3 people interested in Perl it will be fine. If you want a new feature in perl, send in a patch. (Or in the case of perl6, "commits welcome".) > Thats a bit short sighted, without new developers learning Perl you'll > have a lack sooner or later. For example, look at PHP's community. Huge! ... but absolutely no competent core / module developers. Numbers != quality. Regards, Jonathan Rockway -- --- !!perl/hash:.sig name: Jonathan Rockway blog: http://blog.jrock.us/ ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
On 11/30/06, Jonathan Rockway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thats a bit short sighted, without new developers learning Perl you'll > have a lack sooner or later. For example, look at PHP's community. Huge! ... but absolutely no competent core / module developers. Numbers != quality. One thing you should use as a thermometer for technology is wether something is being used or not in a significant scale outside the US and main countries of Europe. This may seem irrelevant, but software development companies such as the ones that exist here in Brazil usually take a much more conservative approach towards technology choice. Hence the lack of Perl shops around here. What really bothers me, however, is Python shops are thriving and recently Ruby (with Rails) has been the first dynamic language to overcome the "enterprise" barrier around here. It nearly impossible to hire Perl developers around here, that's the main problem with using Perl as your platform of choice. I work at a Perl-only shop and really, we'd currently hire *anyone* that isn't a complete moron and knows Perl. The good developers are being thought Java and there's good demand for Java developers. The best places to work around here (i.e. where you'll do actually interesting things) are those companies somehow tied to good universities (the founders are teachers, and so on). All of them either use Java or Python or Ruby. And the bad places to work at are usually Java or .NET shops. This situation creates a vicious cycle where people won't learn Perl because the demand for Perl developers is small and this will ends up hurting the still existing Perl shops. Recently, the SPB (Sociedade Perl do Brasil - Brazilian Perl Society) has been doing a great job promoting Perl at numerous open source events. But, although we've seen actual results from this work (well, at least the mailing lists activity has increased), it doesn't seem to be enough and serious Perl usage around here is still insignificant. I love Perl and I consider it to be the best language for almost every sort of development. However, if I were in a management position and needed to decide the platform my 10-developers project would be developing on, given the context I'm in, I don't know if I'd choose Perl since, frankly, I'd have to (personally) train at least 7 or 8 of those 10 developers. And on top of all that, the so-called "software factories" where mass development is done are all Java around here and that's where the money is, since we've got no buyers for killer Web 2.0 apps. This sums up to a situation where even the good developers get attracted to these places because, although it sucks to work as a code monkey, working as the lead of them usually isn't a bad job in many of those companies. Of course, I don't have a freaking clue on how to proceed in order to change this situation (if that's even possible). We've got some Perl marketing plans at our shop that might end up bringing some attention to Perl around here when (and if) they go into play but as we grow, we're something diving into unknown land due to our limited resource pool. PS: Re-reading this email made me think it's a bit big and non-coherent, but bear with me. ;-) -Nilson Santos F. Jr. ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
On 12/1/06, Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On 11/30/06, Jonathan Rockway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thats a bit short sighted, without new developers learning Perl you'll > > have a lack sooner or later. > > For example, look at PHP's community. Huge! ... but absolutely no > competent core / module developers. Numbers != quality. One thing you should use as a thermometer for technology is wether something is being used or not in a significant scale outside the US and main countries of Europe. This may seem irrelevant, but software development companies such as the ones that exist here in Brazil usually take a much more conservative approach towards technology choice. Hence the lack of Perl shops around here. What really bothers me, however, is Python shops are thriving and recently Ruby (with Rails) has been the first dynamic language to overcome the "enterprise" barrier around here. It doesn't surprise me python is thriving. It's a great language: easy to pick up, regular, "simple", works. I love perl and it's my main programming language. At the same time I realise I have put a huge amount of time into learning it. There's another guy on one of my team's who's a PHP programmer - we have a site that's half PHP and half catalyst. He keeps mentioning learning catalyst and I thought "what if I had to go from PHP to Perl+Catalyst?" and, knowing what I know, it was a scary thought. The learning curve is immense and daunting. I read "Diving into Python" more or less over a weekend and am merrily writing python like it's no big deal. Sure, I'm a programmer and am already introduced to all of the concepts python knows about. But still, there I am doing most of what I can do in perl in another language within a far far shorter time. As for PHP its barrier to entry is so low perl will never ever compete in that space until it can match both the simplicity of the language and ease of installation and deployment. Syntax and other niceties are, frankly, irrelevant. (And similarly any bleating about python's whitespace rules has automatically removed themselves from useful contribution to the discussion, unless they make it particularly witty :-) This situation creates a vicious cycle where people won't learn Perl because the demand for Perl developers is small and this will ends up hurting the still existing Perl shops. Yes, ignore growth at your peril. Perl 5 is a lost cause, IMO. It's just too hard, too crufty, too weighed down by years of negative perception. Perl 6 is our only hope. (And I sincerely hope they call it something different from Perl 6) Paul ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Last Chance / Last Day: Web developmentplatformcontestand Perl / Catalyst
Hello all! I am in Italy. The perception around here is, as many said, that in the enterprise world nobody cares about Perl; there's no big Ruby scene, on the other hand. Python is going a lot better, but the key role is being played by Java, C#.NET, etc.. Finding Perl programmers in my area is not a big problem, because I usually look for any-language programmers who can then learn Perl. Come on, a good coder can learn a new language quickly. The real problem is finding _good_ programmers, no matter the language. ;-) As for PHP its barrier to entry is so low perl will never ever compete in that space until it can match both the simplicity of the language and ease of installation and deployment. I agree with you, mostly. However, most PHP applications are small web sites, coded directly by web designers who wouldn't be able (not because they're idiots, but because there core job is web design) to write anything but a few lines of PHP to submit a form or display a dynamic description of a product on a web page. Perl/Catalyst has to fight with PHP (and of course Rails, etc...) on the larger applications, I think there's no point in trying to enter the small web sites "market". Perl 5 is a lost cause, IMO. It's just too hard, too crufty, too weighed down by years of negative perception. Perl 6 is our only hope. (And I sincerely hope they call it something different from Perl 6) Perl 7? :-) Michele. -- Michele Beltrame http://www.varlogarthas.net/ ICQ# 76660101 Informativa privacy: http://www.italpro.net/em.html ___ List: Catalyst@lists.rawmode.org Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.rawmode.org/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
