
Perl turns 30 and its community continues to thrive - tdurden
https://opensource.com/article/17/10/perl-turns-30
======
oblib
I have some "invoicing" web apps (I suppose they'd be called "SaaS" now) I
wrote in perl starting back in 2001-2002 that are still running. The users
love them, they're fast, reliable, and stable.

I have always admired Larry Wall and learned a lot from reading his stuff but
I never really did get along too well with the "perl community". I was a
member of a few of their mailing list and they all seemed to love telling
people who joined and asked a question that they were lazy and dumb and "RTFM"
was used there more than anyplace I've seen on the web. They worked hard at
chasing away anyone who tried to answer those newbie questions. I finally left
them after years of seeing the trolls harass newbies without any rebuttal
except mine.

I still use perl for setting up users and emailing and database chores but
CPAN has a lot of old modules now that haven't been maintained in years and
going through those can be a pain sometimes.

And I still like and use CGI.pm. The perl community loves to crap on it but
it's still the easiest way there is to parse form data with Perl and a lot of
times that's mainly what I need to do.

~~~
kbenson
> I still use perl for setting up users and emailing and database chores but
> CPAN has a lot of old modules now that haven't been maintained in years and
> going through those can be a pain sometimes.

Distinguishing between modules that are recent and used, recent and unused,
old and used, and old an unused is one of the biggest problems on CPAN.
Thankfully, metacpan helps with this quite a bit. It allows people to favorite
modules, so you can be fairly sure any modules with a few likes will at the
very least be useful and working, even if they haven't been updated in a
couple years (since people are using it, it just means it's very stable). It's
also _much_ easier to search.

It also has lists of modules recently updated and recently submitted.[1]

Finally, if you aren't familiar with the Task::Kensho[2] meta distribution,
you should take a look. It's a curated list of good modules for a specific set
of common areas of need, such as Config file parsing, Webdev, Async
programming, etc.

1: [https://metacpan.org/recent](https://metacpan.org/recent)

2:
[https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::Kensho](https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::Kensho)

