What’s Up #Perl? “It is robust, runs on almost any OS, is available by default [..] Fortune 500 companies use Perl to route, transform, expose, and manipulate extremely complex data at dizzying speeds”
https://www.activestate.com/blog/2016/07/what%E2%80%99s-perl
https://www.activestate.com/webinars/long-time-perl-hackers-view-perl-world-past-present-and-future
https://github.com/paveljurca/geekuni
My answers to Becoming a Web Developer Survey by @joshsimmons, https://docs.google.com/a/oreilly.com/forms/d/1GqxmRTGNfaQ7Hw3y1eSFjbNqZ73bQJ2nUiNy6WJZ5wM/viewform
What do you love about that language? And, be candid, what frustrates you about it?
Perl is fun and gets stuff done. Easy things easy and hard things possible. The community is warm and damn clever and the language itself has been around for 28 years now. Perl might be losing in terms of eyeballs but in a game people cheer to outsiders, right? Larry Wall, the godfather, put a hacker ethos in literally every function call. It’s a goto for systems programming. The underlying TMTOWTDI is what happens to you in life. It’s a living thing, a way. And there’s CPAN. As quoted from Wikipedia: “[..] Perl users are known to express surprise when they start to encounter topics for which a CPAN module doesn’t exist already.”
Perl 6 kind of bothers me. I just don’t get it. It’s more of a rocket science to me. I think if you develop a thing for 15 years, it does deviate.
Why might someone who is entirely new to web development choose that language?
Because we have Dancer, and Dancer2, and Mojolicious. The first one lets you understand how the web app actually works. The latter lets you harvest the latest in web development (web sockets, HTTP/2, CSS3 selectors). There’re resources advent.perldancer.org or perlmaven.com/dancer or an amazing course at geekuni.com/course/perl-web. And always helpful people on IRC or SO.
And of course outstanding modules for JSON, web scraping, WWW APIs, DBIx, Moo for objects..
What tools or websites are commonly used by programmers of that language?
cpanmin.us (cpanm), perlbrew.pl, perldoc
Perl Monks perlmonks.org
Perl Mongers pm.org
Perl Tricks perltricks.com
Are there any libraries you find yourself using on almost every project? What are they?
LWP::Simple or Test::More, and Dancer2
What frameworks are you aware of that are built in that language?
What content management systems are you aware of that are built in that language?
Is there anything else about that language that you think people should know?
Try Perl and wonder ;))
I’m glad I’ve found Perl. Now you did too.
You may not hear Perl around much (yet and now)
If I find too many people adapting a certain idea, I probably think it’s wrong. Donald Knuth
You may be alone. But you’re right.
People start with PHP or Ruby not because it’s better — it’s just what someone else would do.
Perl is all over the web, just look closer.
Just today, I’ve came across email sign-up form on website http://www.aweber.com/sign-up-forms.htm, and it did call https://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl :))
“Larry Wall released Perl 0 on usenet in 1987 then quickly became language of the web and all the sys admins.”
…
“Common things should be easy; advanced things should at least be possible.” Larry Wall, noted from the Learning Perl book, 3rd edition
Around 2012 I escaped from Windows to openSUSE, stumbled upon BASH and saw The Social Network movie where Zuckerberg “modified that Perl script.” So I borrowed Learning Perl, 5th edition, learnt only the basics, then almost forgot, and now it’s June 2014, the Learning Perl book on my desk again together with a decision to learn as much as I can.
You ask me why? Because I find llamas, alpacas and camels cool!
You can do a lot.
sysadmins, bioperl.org, mojolicio.us, data munging[link the book], text-processing, scrapping the web
However cool Ruby or Python might nowadays be, you should know Perl first.
If nothing else, you’ll always need “quick-and-dirty programs that you whip up in three minutes.”[1, p. 7]
Learn from books, just look up in your library (techlib.cz here in Prague).
“Camels are there to get the job done despite all difficulties.” [Learning Perl, 5th edition, p. 5]
Maybe you don’t see so much Perl around you.
I think there might be 2 reasons:
a) they don’t talk about it
b) they are wrong
From reading the Learning Perl book I do understand what an awesome language, community and philosophy behind it is.
It’s a no brainer it deserves much more attention.
I mean, most of the students don’t know Perl because on high school or college you do 95% PHP. And on Windows you just click buttons - it’s strange.
Where are languages most applied nowadays? Yes, it’s the web! At least it’s the realm from where you get that notion of popularity of any language.
We should ask what for should Perl be used for and is not? Because you’re sure not gonna use it for desktop/mobile apps nor drivers.
So it’s the web. That’s the plce from where you’ll get new people.
..high barriers of knowledge, websites with 10+ year old design.
..to them computer means mainly the internet. So they come to computer languages on web.
The first what they see (and everyone tells them) is the holy trinity PHP+MySQL+phpMyAdmin.
It’s a habit more than deep understanding of why. I mean, no offense but they should know about Perl too. And Perl should be concenrated in this. Having one website with all the solutions for the web
..frameworks, modules, hosting, %ENV whatsoever.
Sending a clear message that Perl is a place where all the people cooperate.
That is the message: “Have fun.”
But it needs to be told that way. Clearly.
Perl for the web and for quick-and-dirty tasks.
So Perl should be promoted for 2 points:
mojo: convos, sharifulin, …
Nobody can spend hours and hours of reading Perl docs, perlmonks, mail archives, whatever to find out what is this really about.
We want a newcomer to start in a minute. And we want him to know why.
I mean, lets create an excelent starting point; something I can show off to my friend and get him curious.
Talk to people in their sixteens and show them what a cool language it really is.
Go to high schools, tell tem, set up volunteer courses on web development.
I mean the web scrapping is the coolest feature today.
And maybe because you’re still stuck on Windows - on GNU/Linux Perl is a way to go to do any system work.
And at first glance it’s full of regex and Perl-specific keywords, I mean, a bit of scary - looks like language for science geeks.
The first what a newcomer should see and be presented with are quick, neat and understandable scripts you write in minutes.
Tell the story - the long history, which almost no other language has.
And add a bit of centralization, have nice and eye-catchy webdesign for all Perl-related sites that force you to think it’s easy and cool to start with - as what my peers thinks about PHP/Ruby/Python.