Someone needs to take jwz aside...

[Simon Cozens]

On 02/06/2011 21:50, gvim wrote:
> Considering the amount of development you've done on Perl web frameworks over
> the years isn't this tantamount to having given up on Perl, at least for web
> development?

Yes and no. I've moved from being more of a developer to being more of a user.
Perl is a fantastic language for developers. It has a great culture for
developers. We're all brilliant at producing tools which other developers can
pick up and do really great stuff with. Perl is wonderful if I want to write
my own web framework, or construct my own CMS on top of one of the hundreds of
Perl web frameworks which already exist.

But these days I don't. I don't have infinite amounts of time to enjoy
fiddling with programming. I just want to get stuff done. Most of the time, I
want applications, not libraries. Perl culture is wonderful if I want to build
my own CMS, but not all that wonderful if I just want to use one, because
we're all writing for other developers and not necessarily for end users. When
it comes to a fairly customizable site that I can throw up pretty quickly and
start editing content on, then Drupal blows away... well, I don't even know
what. Bricolage? WebGUI? Moveable Type is probably the closest equivalent, and
it isn't particularly equivalent.

Yes, sure, I could write one, and I haven't, so in that sense, yeah, I've
given up on Perl. But the reason I haven't written one is that Drupal does
what I want, and I don't actually care what technology it's built on so long
as it works, and to imagine that I ought to reinvent that particular wheel
just out of some strange loyalty to Perl is to miss the point that a
programming language is a tool, not an end in itself - once again ignoring
what the end user cares about.

I still code, and when I code, I still code in Perl. So in that sense, no, I
haven't given up on Perl. But at the same time, I'm not remotely interested in
making Perl the greatest all-singing all-dancing language there is with nice
carbon copies of all the other applications out there; I'm *happy* to use Perl
in a tool-smithing, glom-modules-together way because that's what it's good
at. *Really* good at. If I am developing new code, I find that really useful.
I mean it, Perl does have a great culture for developers.

But for end-user stuff, I'll use whatever tools I find available to get the
job done. There is, after all, more than one way to do it.