Re: Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous?

...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

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Comment on Re: Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous?

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Re^2: Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous? by pg (Canon) on Sep 05, 2005 at 21:27 UTC
I would like to extend a little bit on CGI. For a programming language to gain user bases, application areas are very important. If there are several areas, or even one, in which Perl is the first choice, or one of the first choices, Perl will gain its user bases much faster. Two examples: 1) Perl was once the most preferred, if not the only one, language for CGI. If you want a CGI application, go Perl, and Perl did grew at its fastest pace back then. 2) Today, when people talk about web application, they face two choices, Java or C#. With C# picking up its pace, more and more web applications will be a mixture of C# (front end) and Java (web services). Perception is important here. When you choose language for an application, will you survey all the languages out there, no, you don't. You read couple of magazines, attend several seminars (doesn't matter whether you think this is wise, that's the life). What in front of you is a set of limited choices that other people have presented to you. Not to say that, language is just one of those decisions you need to make, how much time are you willing to spend on it? It is great that people thought/think Perl was/is the de facto language for CGI. However, if this is still the impression today, it becomes a minus, not a plus any more, as CGI is gone. Perl's future relies on whether it can once again find one or two areas that Perl is the de facto language.	[reply]
Re^3: Script kiddies and the like: beneficial or disadvantageous? by blazar (Canon) on Sep 06, 2005 at 10:50 UTC
I do not thoroughly agree with you. But if nothing else, from quite a few articles I could read here at PM, there seems to be a certain consensus among part of the Perl community about your concerns. I wanted to cite some such article, but I couldn't find any easily. Maybe some of you may have ready references...	[reply]