

Helping people find good Perl tutorials - Mithaldu
http://szabgab.com/blog/2011/11/helping-people-find-good-perl-tutorials.html

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Sukotto
Perl used to be cool. It used to bring a lot of functionality and flexibility
that you just couldn't get anywhere else.

But it's not unique anymore. And it no longer brings anything truly amazing to
the table that you can't find in a competitor language.

I think perl will never really go away though it has clearly reached a long-
halflife twilight phase [1]. Unless a miracle happens, it will never return to
dominance in anything other than niche domains (like quick-n-dirty commandline
scripts).

[1] <http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl>

* But what about perl 6, Larry Wall's ambitious project to basically rewrite perl from scratch?

For sure what he's doing is interesting. But he's unlikely to create anything
so compelling that it will make people want to switch from the other languages
taking over perl market share. It's the Netscape re-write all over again.
Except perl 6 will have to compete with a number of other fabulous open source
languages not a single corporate one.

Perl 6 seems more like an academic research project than a real language.

* But perl 5.x is incorporating all the best stuff from perl 6. And we even have simple OO now!

Anything really worth having from perl6 is also going to get pulled into
python, ruby, and hell, even lua ... and all of those languages have better
traction and forward momentum than perl 5.

* But people use perl for important stuff!

I'm sure they do and they will continue to do so. Hell, iirc, perl's even used
by some cool websites like duckduckgo... but that doesn't mean that perl isn't
in decline. It doesn't mean that it's popular. It doesn't mean that a lot of
people are going to start using it.

\--

I feel sad. Perl's been a big part of my career for over 10 years. It's been
my go-to language for over 15. I wish I didn't feel like it's slowly dying.

~~~
mjgardner
"But it's not unique anymore. And it no longer brings anything truly amazing
to the table that you can't find in a competitor language."

Name another multi-paradigm language with as broad, deep and well-tested
library as CPAN.

"Unless a miracle happens, it will never return to dominance in anything other
than niche domains (like quick-n-dirty commandline scripts)."

When has "dominance" (whatever that means) or popularity ever been the goal or
desirable? I can't think of any language or system that is universally
"dominant"; all have niches to work.

You don't get into programming because you want to do what all the cool kids
are doing. Paul Graham (you might have heard of him, you're using his site)
argued very well on the advantages of choosing above-average tools for above-
average results. (<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>)

~~~
TylerE
Having dealt with CPAN, I'll take python and pip _any day_. CPAN is
practically the definition of dependency hell. For developers it may be good
(I don't write Perl, so I dunno), but for end users it's a real clusterfrak.

~~~
ojosilva
The only dependency hell I've had installing modules in my 14 years of
programming with dynamic languages was trying to get 2 different Rails apps to
work out of the same gems...

Ruby, my other favorite language besides Perl, is just as vulnerable to
dependency problems as... every other language!

Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, they all have lots of packages and modules that
depend on each other. So do many Linux distributions. Dependency hell is not
language nor domain specific.

After all these years, one of the reasons I stick with Perl and CPAN is
precisely because I can monitor and anticipate dependency problems with CPAN
Testers. MetaCPAN has nice impact analysis tools too. I'm yet to find
something comparable in any other language ecosystem. Hell, you can't even
specify a minimum version of a module to import in Python, like in Perl's "use
Module 2.3".

~~~
Mithaldu
Honestly, i'm fairly sure he just plain doesn't know that "dependency hell"
means "can't install stuff because of conflicting or circular dependencies";
but thinks that the term means "well them sure are a lof of deps, yup".

------
danmaz74
I always wondered why it is so difficult to find the best tutorials that are
all over the net. A good directory of tutorials would be incredibly useful, is
it possible that nobody is trying to fill that space?

~~~
Mithaldu
Read to the end of the article. I'm working on it: <http://perl-tutorial.org>
:)

~~~
danmaz74
Good luck with it then :)

------
mandreko
I think there's a joke somewhere in this headline, but I just can't put my
finger on it.

~~~
cytzol
It's a joke that Perl has no good tutorials? I think that's what the article
is trying to fix!

