
Angry Perl Users - swombat
http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/01/08/angry-perl-users
======
bprater
It has always been a well-known fact that the founding fathers of Perl had
only a passing interest in all things web.

It shouldn't be completely surprising, because of this, other technologies
have slowly displaced the language. For the longest time, if you went to #perl
on IRC, you'd get booted for asking web-related questions.

I still contend that one of the smartest moves ever -- was for the PHP boys to
make their language "just work" on millions of web servers. I still feel pain
from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.

~~~
swombat
I wonder how communities go from "a few of the founding members don't really
care about X" to "if you mention X on the channel you'll get booted". That
seems like a huge and disturbing jump in fanaticism, and a decrease in
popularity is well deserved if they really have that mentality.

~~~
gaius
Well, not really. I guess they got sick of the same _how do I write a CGI?_
questions again and again.

Perl was popular for the web for one reason and one reason only: It was the
only dynamic interpreted language that was widely available, and it was widely
available for the simple reason that your sysadmins had already installed it
for their own use. Back in the early-mid 90s, you got C, C++ (maybe) and
FORTRAN compilers on the typical institutionally-owned (university or
corporate) large, Internet-connected Unix box. The choices for any ordinary
user wanting to put something dynamic on the web were, umm, C and that's about
it, or Perl. Lots of people got into Perl just for CGI like nowadays they get
into Ruby just for Rails (or Tcl just for Tk).

~~~
kragen
You could have written your CGI scripts in Tcl too --- it was also dynamic,
interpreted, and widely available. But Perl was better.

~~~
gaius
Perl had "better" regexp handling, certainly. But several major products such
as AOLServer and CNET's StoryServer (which they later spun off into a separate
company) were Tcl-based. Joe Hacker running a website out of his home
directory at college wouldn't have seen them but Tcl was once a huge presence
on high-traffic websites.

Incidentally back then Tcl was only really a presence on Sun kit... Perl was
already everywhere.

------
systems
It would be nice if he adds Groovy to the list

~~~
davidw
Hrm. I was going to respond and say that I didn't think it registered on
enough of the metrics I use, but I went and checked and it does get hits on
Amazon, Freshmeat, and even a few job postings on Craigslist. I guess I should
consider it.

By the way, while we're on the subject, what do people think of adding
ColdFusion? It's sort of a weird hybrid... yeah it's a language, but it
appears to me to be even more web specific than PHP. Does it even have a
standalone interpreter of some kind? I really don't know that much about it.

