Perl is dead

[Michele Beltrame]

Hi Stefano!

> Ok for Perl as a language, but the point gains sense if Perl is considered
> as a technology. For example, I think PHP gained momentum for the
> simplicity of the installing procedures of products based on it.

I think this simplicity of those installations derives from the fact that
providers are easily able to build a php/mod_php which includes the most used
things (mail functions, database access, image processing) directly into the
php binary. PHP programmers only need to upload their .php files via FTP and
they just work. No modules to install, it's all already there.

Also, mod_php provides a "semi-persistent" environment where at least the
interpreter and the modules are already loaded, provided an interesting
performance gain over plain CGI. mod_perl and mod_fastcgi don't really
provide such functionality in the sense that also the application is
persistent, which is not a desirable thing for little, seldomly hit,
pages, or in a shared hosting environment; moreover, they're harder to work
with by the "casual" web programmer.

Should we go as far as creating a "mod_lightperl" alike to mod_php, which
makes the interpreter stay resident and and bundles the commonly used web-related
modules? Used together with something like HTML::Mason this could
actually become something really akin to PHP, with the only difference
that one writes its code in Perl. And then Dreamweaver users could use
Perl as easily as PHP; but, at this point, more than Perl it would be
"a web development system where you enter some Perl inside your web
pages".

Is this the application we want now? I'm unsure (for real).

Michele.

-- 
Michele Beltrame
http://www.cattlegrid.info/
ICQ 76660101 - MSN mb at italpro.net