Writing About Perl

[Simon Cozens]

On 23/08/2011 19:39, Dave Cross wrote:
> If a popular Linux magazine had given you the opportunity to write a 3000 word
> article giving a practical project-based demonstration of how Perl had moved
> on in the last ten years, what would you do? What would you write about?

What's changed in the past ten years? I don't think this is going to be a very
popular answer, but: not much. At least, not much that's user-facing. Sure,
there have been some minor adjustments to the language, but nothing so
exciting that it's worth sharing with people who aren't true believers already.

Ten years ago, design and implementation of Perl 6 had begun in earnest. 'nuff
said.

Ten years ago, CPAN was considerably smaller than it is today, but looking
back over my code from 10 years ago, at the time we *were* using CPAN modules
for the majority of heavy-lifting in our applications. That hasn't changed.

The Moose/Modern Perl/whatever doctrinaire style is new; 10 years ago,
TMTOWTDI still meant something. You could try rewriting an old piece of code
in Moose and showing how different it is.

Lightweight web frameworks are new, and are probably the only thing worth
screaming about to the world at large.

In all honestly, I don't think there are, unfortunately, too many areas where
Perl has been the driver of technological change over that time; we're
generally pretty good at providing interfaces to other interesting things that
are going on, and maybe that is Perl's role and we should rejoice in it. It
doesn't make great marketing copy though.

There. That should be enough for the simian terpsichory to begin, out of which
might come some better suggestions.