Better Perl

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:
> On 4/4/08, Jonathan Stowe <jns at gellyfish.com> wrote:
>  > On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 10:00 +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote:
>  >  > On 04/04/2008, Jonathan Tweed <jonathan at tweed.name> wrote:
>  >  > > > Perl still isn't dead, it's still kicking, and it will be around for a
>  >  > > > while.
>  >  > >  Just like COBOL.
>  >  >
>  >  > There really isn't any comparison.
>  >  >
>  >  > How many people are teaching themselves COBOL, how many people are
>  >  > building startups on COBOL, how many new open source projects were
>  >  > written or released in COBOL this year?
>  >
>  >
>  > That isn't a good comparison either - remember what the 'B' in COBOL
>  >  stands for.
>  >
>  >  Also people keep mentioning "startups" in this thread and it is annoying
>  >  me, what has "startups" got to do with anything? There are a lot of
>  >  startups that don't use computers at all for their core business - like
>  >  ice cream shops and coffee bars and cleaning companies, except what
>  >  people mean by startups in this thread are crappy little web sites full
>  >  of vacuous ideas and rounded corners with no business plan, I don't
>  >  believe that is a clear indicator of anything - personally I'd rather
>  >  they'd all fuck off and do their stuff in PHP
>
>  You mean like facebook? (PHP)
>
>  Or Wikipedia? (PHP)
>  Or Digg? (PHP)
>  Or Youtube? (Py)
>  Or Bebo? (ASP)
>  Or MySpace? (ASP)
>  Or Orkut? (was ASP)
>  Or match.com? (ASP)
>  Or *.google.com? (Java, C++, Py)
>  Or about any other multi-box site you care to mention? (!Perl)
>
>  LiveJournal, Typepad do use Perl. Anyone else??
>
>
>  >  or whatever is fashionable
>  >  today and let the rest of us get on with writing code for businesses
>  >  that know what they are doing.
>
>  Any perl businesses with multi-<s>billion</s> million, even, dollar valuations?
>
>  Morgan Stanley doesn't count :-)

Yeah - this is again a play of 'how many web sites using Perl you
remember'.  What I tried was a bit more methodological.  I went to a
hackers meeting organised by people reading
http://news.ycombinator.com/, there was a room packed with people,
most of them programmers, maybe half of them or more working on a
startup - and none of them was using Perl (there was a kind of intro
when everyone talked about the technology he uses and it was RoR,
Django, PHP, Haskel, Erlang and probably other technologies, but no
Perl).  Sure this sample was biased towards young people and small
startups - that's why I've started the thread at Perlmonks:
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=676335 - to check if other people
have similar experiences.

Cheers,
Zbigniew