Personally I'm no longer working on CGI work, all the stuff I do is strictly back-end now. It still seems true that Perl is heavily used in the CGI field though, and this is as it should be since in the two years I did spend working in the CGI field I did see just how heavily text-manipulation features in the average CGI programmer's toolkit.

There are a lot of CGI questions here, yes, but I personally view this as a good point. If people are asking the chances are they're willing to learn, and if they ask here they're likely to be told more correct answers than if they'd asked elsewhere such as the numerous 'Beginning CGI' boards around the net. We don't want to see yet another generation of Matt Wrights here I think.

Ultimately people ask the questions, and post the articles, which they want to. The articles I'm most interested in are things like integration (XS, Inline etc), design and architecture (Design patterns, refactoring and the like), 'Perl tricks', and overviews of CPAN to point out the modules I may not know about. I'm still happy people post their CGI things though, since it's in no way stopping me from seeing what I'm more interested in, and they're often good reading anyway. Less CGI content wouldn't create more non-CGI content, I think.

I would like to see Perl used in a more widespread fashion and not just for CGI coding, but the fact remains that CGI is one of Perl's main fortes and is also where a lot of people 'enter the Perl world' and so have more questions. I would be curious to know what proportion of people here use Perl is various ways though!

In reply to Re: Are we obsessed with CGI? by Molt
in thread Are we obsessed with CGI? by rinceWind

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