Perl is dead

[Adeola Awoyemi]

On 4/12/08 13:01, Abigail wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 01:33:13PM +0100, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
>    
>> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 08:45:02AM +0000, David Dorward wrote:
>>      
>>> Léon Brocard wrote:
>>>        
>>>> Did anyone go to the London Perl Workshop this weekend?
>>>> About 200.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> Including me. It was very well organised and had some great talks.
>>>        
>> Aren't most Perl events (more than 20 worldwide in 2008, more than
>> 10 already announced for 2009) only reaching people *within* the Perl
>> community?
>>      
>
>
> So, if you think that "Perl is dying" (which, BTW, I don't agree with,
> and haven't agree with for more than 10 years. The cries "Perl is dying"
> I've heard ever since I joined my first Perl community in 1995 - and it
> still isn't dead.), then I don't think the number of conferences, or
> the number of attendees swings the argument one way or the other.
>    
Very true.

I myself came from a graphic design bacground, using technologies like 
XHTML, Javascript, Flash and Lingo (why?). When I started looking at 
server-side technologies, naturally I picked-up PHP as that's what 
everyone (my colleagues) were talking about. A funny thing happened 
cause after about 3 months or so learning PHP and hacking on PHP 
projects, I found Perl. Since then I never looked back. I sometimes 
still delve into PHP but I have loved the Perl way of doing things and 
found the former a bit weird.

The other thing I can say is that by learning Perl's "ways", it has 
developed my overall programming knowledge and affected even the way I 
write [Java|Action]Script which to me is a bonus.

So for me, it's still going strong and if anything at all it would be 
helpful to have web frameworks (Catalyst et al) that are easier to 
pick-up so, for instance, us "designers" can build cool-sh*t without 
first re-wiring our brains ;-) It's not much of a problem with me as 
like Sylar (please forgive the Heroes reference), I like looking into 
the brains of things to see how they work... but I can't say the say for 
my designer colleagues.

Adeola.