Re: Perl "Going the way of the dinosaur"

On 19/02/2008, Rodney Clang <rodney.clang@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> To the uninitiated or person "considering" Perl, seeing articles
> averaging 5+ yrs of age, it looks like a ghost town. The reality is that
> many of those articles are still relevant. But how can you explain/train
> that concept? The parallel is people looking up at sourceforge and like
> sites, ... to see a module that's 5 yrs old will communicate that it's
> headed for death. Do we "bump" these articles or rally for writing new
> ones? If they looked to CPAN to start with, they'd see a very active
> bunch. The truth is our Perl world is very stable and we're all busy
> getting work done by writing Perl code and we've stopped writing about
> Perl. Newer alternatives are still in ramp-up stages, and so the
> articles and activity make it look busier and safe from the roads of
> abandonment.

Yup - the thing about perl is that aside from the dot.com Matt's
scripters bubble we've been using it to get our jobs done without
making much fuss.

I've been doing Perl almost exclusively since I graduated from uni in
2000 and I'm still surprised by how widely used it is - in fact I
think my last few jobs and contracts have all been in places that your
average Java or Python programmer would say "Perl wouldn't work" -
naturally it has, hence my working there - usually on new projects and
new code :  High availability Aviation re****ting for airlines,
logistics companies and private pilots, Massive email
scanning/archiving systems, and a high traffic classifieds site - all
with large codebases, complex systems and high expectations for
uptime, and correctness.

Here's a nice little gem - Perl has the world's online classifieds
pretty much sown up as it's used by craigslist, gumtree and slando,
not to mention many smaller outfits around the world.

Then there is the Danga high-end software stack that's powering a lot
of the biggest web 2.0 sites : Mofilefs, Perlbal, etc.

A.

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