Writing About Perl

[Zbigniew Łukasiak]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Simon Cozens <simon at simon-cozens.org>wrote:

> 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.
>


CPAN still is a driver of techno-social change.  Other repositories are
maybe catching up - but CPAN is still on the frontier and it is the one that
is being copied.  Open Source has the chronic malaise of fragmentation, of
disagreement, of debating all decisions and forking.  The Perl community is
not exception - and it is even worse in the lack of leader-library like
Rails that would align the development.  It also might seem that TIMTOWDI
only leads to further fragmentation - but it also forces us to reject our
assumptions and thus leads us to discover what is arbitrary and what is
objective.  One of these discoveries is the reliance on tests,

-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/