...question, especially aimed at more experienced users that "were there" when thing was still growing up, is wether retrospectively they judge the phenomenon to have had a positive or a negative influence on Perl culture, diffusion, etc.

I can only offer a partial answer to your question here, having "been there" when the Web Wave washed up on the shores of the pre-html software industry, but not myself being into Perl, back then.

The point i want to make though is, that in general the software industry at large DID suffer a general (though temporary) set back in those years, with respect to the then prevalent best practices of layered, structured, object- and component based design and construction.

All of a sudden, during the accelerating inflation of the dot.com bubble, many (and not just inexperienced 'kiddies') were trying to build complex web-applications and -UI's based on brittle and feature-weak markup and pure scripting languages, like a mix of HTML and server- as well as clientside scripts such as ASP & javascript.

Compared to this architecture, HTML plus CGI && Perl would actually have offered oportunities for a BETER application design, considering that Perl even back then had the functionality of a full blown, dynamic programming language (though i can imagine that many newcomers may not have utilized this).

The scene was more favourable in the Java world, with a strong programming language and a cleaner separation of UI and "code behind", -- it took MS a couple of years to catch up to this level with the release of the .NET/C# platform,... after which we were pretty much back to the state of the days of "structured and OO-design" before the Web Wave.

So, back in the early days of the Internet, anyone could (and were in fact pretty much forced to) hack up code for web sites in HTML and CGI/Perl, or in ASP and javascript, even in JSP and Java (remember applets?). And many commercial firms basically did that, in an attempt to build applications on time, but alas also often on feet of clay.

You can argue that Perl - with its several programming paradigms and TMOWTDI'ness - back then was instrumental in developing unstructured hacking, but that's the price you pay for a open programming environment: you can choose the submachine gun (and risk shooting yourself in the foot), or you can choose the club; Much of the Perl culture in fact (not the least here at Perl Monks) is about teaching perl people how to not use the submachine gun as a club....


Allan Dystrup

===========================================================
As the eternal tranquility of Truth reveals itself to us, this very place is the Land of Lotuses
-- Hakuin Ekaku Zenji

In reply to Re: Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous? by ady
in thread Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous? by blazar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.