in reply to Re^4: Prioritizing Broken CPAN Modules
in thread Prioritizing Broken CPAN Modules

There is, however, a lot of baseless yet cohesive hatred for Perl

That's just ridiculous. There is mockery and sarcasm, but there is no lot of hatred. The loudest voices I've heard against Perl came from people who used it and weren't happy with it, so it is not baseless. The mainstream just ignores Perl: ignorance isn't hatred. The "hatred" saga is abused by those who feel stuck to Perl - to justify verbal retaliation.

Perl has less attention than it had ten or twenty years ago. It was extremely comfortable to start Perl back then, with all the infrastructure like CPAN nicely in place, and it appears that too many took that for granted. By now, many of those who built that infrastructure have either retired or moved elsewhere. The lesson is that it is up to the current Perl community to keep this infrastructure up and running, be it CPAN, the software running PerlMonks, or organizing conferences, or the community itself.

Blaming the hatred of others for the current situation is quite popular these days, yet I am convinced that it is a recipe for failure.

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Re^6: Prioritizing Broken CPAN Modules
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jan 03, 2020 at 23:36 UTC

    We live in very different worlds then. I am a vessel of truth here and this is experience online and coming out of Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond which happen to be somewhat important to the direction of language usage. You weren’t here for this thread, for example: Re: I want you to convince me to learn Perl.

    The situation in Perl’s increasing marginalization has little to nothing to do with the hatred—I never, ever said it did—and everything to do with deployment issues, apps, binding to modern libs, Perl Ludditism, and general infighting. If you are suggesting, implicitly, against my point that Java is a natural, self-organized, pleasant language that won the market through its sheer delight… I wouldn’t know how to respond.

[reply]
      > my point that Java is a natural,

      IDE support with comfortable code completion is a crucial factor.

      It means that a manager can afford to hire a bunch of cheap untrained blokes which will produce many LOC with simple point and click.

      That's a successful win/win situation:

      • the manager can show his LOC-to-salary ratio and praise his managerial skills
      • and the blokes can pretend to be programmers which know what they are doing and will talk badly about "primitive scripting languages"
      Of course that's true for other statically typed languages, too.

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

[reply]
        That's a successful win/win situation:

        While I can admit that bean counting matters, in this case I think it is a perfect example of false economy. There may be an exception or two but all the major movers I can think of eschew Java in the main. It’s part of what the “Great Hackers” article discusses. What you are describing is the underlying and absolute need for good tools. But what that situation really is is lipstick on a pig instead of good tools built on and for good tools.

[reply]
Re^6: Prioritizing Broken CPAN Modules
by LanX (Saint) on Jan 04, 2020 at 00:21 UTC
    > There is mockery and sarcasm, but there is no lot of hatred

    I've been so many times in situations where only mentioning Perl made me feel like a Buddhist monk in ISIS headquarter that I stopped counting.

    There is some truth in your words, because the hate is nowadays often replaced by ridicule and even pity. That's even worse because Perl is not considered dead and not a competitor anymore.

    Of course it's also the fault of a community which ignored changes in the ecosystem and wasn't able to address the needs of important multipliers.

    But badmouthing was an important factor, because most of the criticized factors are equally true for much more successful competitors.

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

[reply]
      I've been so many times in situations where only mentioning Perl made me feel like a Buddhist monk in ISIS headquarter that I stopped counting.

      Well, there seems to be a difference though: A Buddhist monk in ISIS headquarters would probably have just been able to count to one. You might be able to notice that in this world people get killed because of various sorts of hatred.

      It is exactly this type of exaggeration which annoys me.

[reply]
        Obvious metaphors are not meant to be taken literally.

        I also know famous members of the Perl community which lose their cool once you mention "Emacs".

        Same shit other colour.

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

[reply]

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