Can you produce a reference for this? What is it about Perl that makes it so unsavory?

I knew that using perl wasn't making me popular, but I didn't think of it as a loadstone in that sense either....

This isn’t wikipedia. My reference is me. I was at Amazon when they decided Java was the way forward—because XML and Java was the future of all programming and coincidentally the first step to off-shoring—for all customer service code, 1999, and that rewriting *hundreds* of tools into Java made sense and doing new “experimental” stuff in Ruby was a good idea because Perl was a trainwreck of write only line noise. It was the same timeline Yahoo ditched Perl for PHP for its workaday stuff. Here is some perspective from the era: Beating the Averages.

Java, Python, and, to a much lesser degree, Ruby hackers spent a lot of energy putting Perl down back then. The ugly secret of the world—from programming to politics—is FUD works really well.

The specific genesis of Perl6 was exactly this atmosphere and growing distaste and backlash regarding Perl5.

Punchline at Amazon is that particular tool suite in Java crashed and burned after 18 months of wasting time and $millions and getting something like 20% code complete compared to the Perl/C tools that already existed and had taken about the same amount of time to write. The Java was also so slow it was halfway unusable and most employees took to using the old tools—instead of stalling customers on the phone for the five or ten minutes it took a tool to run—despite there being zero training or encouragement. The whole thing ended up being redone. In Perl. I wasn’t there for that and have no idea how long it lasted. Off-shoring started soon after that. I left the department over the issue and direction. The only reason I know that part of the story is two dummies who don’t understand corporate espionage at all talked about it two seats away for a half hour on a Seattle City bus.

I was there too, and I think it's only part of the story.

There always has been a small sector among developers/architects/sysadmins who have always known that Perl is vastly superior eg to PHP, and to most languages if your objective is to get a stable working product out the door in the digital era.

Perl never went away and has been in continuous use at all the companies mentioned, forms the back end to my text editor, my DB CLI tool, etc etc. I work at one of the largest internet service providers and Perl has never stopped being at the core of the company, and I am not just referring to the cPanel that we provide to tens of millions of customers around the world. I mean many of our internal APIs, DB layers, etc.

Sure Perl lost some cachet and lots of market share, and there is quite clearly a huge majority of Pointy-Haired Boss -types who parrot out the conventional wisdom that Perl is out of date and ineffective. But that's not reality. Perl has advanced steadily since taking like 8 years to throw out 95% of the stuff that was ill-advisedly stuffed into it during the era when "Perl6" was thought of as a successor to Perl, i.e. around v5.10 to around v5.18.

I believe my friend Your Mother is overstating both the effects of the opprobrobium Perl faces in the real business world, and the benefits of the "contributions" of Liz M and the "Perl6" crew. As someone (chromatic?) said somewhere, "say() and ... ?"

Also it irritates me when there are lots of discussions about what is missing from Perl as if that was an established fact. Some of the folks who keep discussing what's needed in core Perl before e.g. a new version number should be used, should get out into CPAN and the real world and see that there's no blocker whatsoever to building today's software with Perl. There is a first-class OOP system in Moo. There is a first-class signatures/type validation/param checking layer in Method::Signatures (sorry that experimental core stuff is Weak!). There is a first-class concurrency layer in MCE. Etcetera. It is annoying to hear non-Perl people repeating myths about Perl's so-called deficiencies, but even more so when it's Perl people who are saying that because they are so focussed on P5P or whatever that they have not kept up with the state of the arts. Do you think SRI and Jan-Henning and Doug Bell and Joel Berger and the rest of the Mojo crew feel at all constrained by Perl's "missing features"? I know we don't at $work. We build better, more reliable, equally scaleable software in far less time than the teams that are building clients against our APIs in Java or .NET or any other framework.

Perl rules, and it's counterproductive in my view to keep restating the ancient history of the rise of PHP as if it's the current state of things. Perl has recovered from those days and the misguided steps to stuff every notion of new techniques generated by the "Perl6" crew into it. It still suffers from the effects of the missteps, but it's in widespread and growing use in the corporate world in many sectors. We are a smaller fish than we used to be but the pond is a million times bigger.

Bah! When it comes to Perl, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

update: s/top-shelf/first-class/, thx hippo



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

So there were many benefits from the analysis and visions behind Perl 6.

The question is rather: is p5p as an institution capable of having any visions?

IMHO was Perl 6 also an attempt to bypass the deadlocks there.

I don't mean there shouldn't have been such a project, it just should have got a code name, not squat on the next version number.

Jenda
1984 was supposed to be a warning,
not a manual!

I've been favouring the name "Perl++" for almost a decade now.

What I don't like is insults and non constructive language.

There are good reasons why people picked one road or the other.

Constantly harassing them doesn't help agreeing about a better way.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

"The question is rather: is p5p as an institution capable of having any visions?"

You are so skilled at compiling so much arrogance and offensiveness into such a few words. Why not take some of your many suggestions, hypotheticals, and esoteric debate questions out of your REPL and over there and offer to help?



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

For the records:

I don't reply to this particular user anymore.

An advice other brethren should have taken, before leaving this board for good.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}