





How can you praise Perl for having projects that are merely ports of projects from other languages, like Plack?
What truly original ideas have originated from the Perl community in recent years?
The success of a language is measured by innovation, not imitation.

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> What truly original ideas have originated from the Perl community in recent years?

Yes, Moose

Python's bullwinkel

Ruby's doodle

Javascript's joose


None of those Moose clones seem even remotely popular.


@Ada I believe that PHP are about to add support for roles (in some manner), which is part of the awesomeness that is Moose.

I also don't see any shame in admitting that other communities have good ideas and borrowing them.


I have omitted Devel::NYTProf, which is an excellent profiler developed originally at the New York Times. http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-NYTProf/

I dont think much of their publication, but i really like their profiler.


@Ada You seem to be unfamiliar with Moose or any of the derived counterparts (in other languages) that implement meta-programming. If that's true, then your ability to take such a position is severely lacking.


@Adam Nothing wrong with borrowing from other communities, as long as your own produces innovations too.
But please show me just one technology that has been developed within the Perl community during the last few years and that became popular in the outside world.
Roles are surely not an original Perl concept, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=230540.


@anaio My point is that what you lot are calling "Modern Perl" is just a bunch of libraries ported from other languages, not a single item is truly original or special.
Let me repeat myself, i hereby challenge you to show me just one thing the Perl community has developed during the last few years that became popular in the outside world!


Quoting Ada:
"The success of a language is measured by innovation, not imitation."

Oh? says who? What are the 'innovations' in C/Java/C++/C# in the latest years? I hope you will not dare to affirm those languages are not successful either :-)

Maybe those languages, just like Perl, do not need to 'innovate' because (gasp!) they already are pretty good.


@Ada Well, Perl's strength has always been that it has taken the good things from other sources and mashed them together in a way that gives it greater utility. Perl has always been a pragmatic language with a pragmatic community. Being the first at doing something doesn't mean it is the best. I prefer the quality of implementation that I get from most high-profile Perl projects than the newest shiny any day of the week. "Modern Perl" is the equivalent to Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It is about avoiding the bad parts of the language and embracing the good parts.

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@Ada - WWW::Mechanize is a module originated in Perl and ported to Ruby for example. I don't see any wrongs in porting good libraries between languages


@oxtan C: nginx, Java: Solr, C++: MongoDB… just to name a few recent innovations for those languages that have become popular outside their respective communities.

@Tudor That module is 10 years old, that's before Perl was even considered dead, i asked for recent developments.


I don't remember Smalltalk inventing stateful, parametric traits, especially when I had the design for Perl 6 roles sketched out *before* the publication of that traits paper. (Ask Dr. Black about that sometime.)

You might also put TAP in the list of Perl inventions other languages have started to adopt.


@chromatic I'm asking for recent innovations, not stuff that happened 10-20 years ago.

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@Ada - Saying that nginx is a C innovation is like saying that Facebook is a PHP innovation or that Twitter is a Ruby one.

Also, if you consider Perl dead because it does not add sufficient innovation, then how do you consider .NET? not even born yet?


What a waste of time to argue with someone who unilaterally gets to dismiss anything interesting as "not innovative" and who is solely responsible for defining the terms "innovative" and "original" and "invented" and "factually".

(The intellectually honest of the world might suggest rather that other communities are 10 - 20 years *behind* Perl in adopting certain features. JavaScript's new strict mode comes to mind.)


@Tudor Yes, i think those giant web services do qualify as a huge success for their respective programming languages, even though in the context of this blog post we are primarily talking about open source software projects.
And .Net is not a programming language but a runtime, and there are quite a few very innovative languages running on it, such as JavaScript and Ruby.

@chromatic So you pretty much agree that Perl has passed its prime and there has been no true innovation happening for 10-20 years?


believers believe, there is nothing mere mortals can do, except keep coding.



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MySQL HandlerSocket( https://github.com/ahiguti/HandlerSocket-Plugin-for-MySQL ) from DeNA.
DeNA(Japan's leading social games company which had acquired ngmoco recently) is a Perl shop.
(See http://www.slideshare.net/notolab/dena-loves-perl )
Perl is the dominant scripting language in Japan. ( http://yapcasia.org/2011/en/ )

They released HandlerSocket with C++ and Perl codes at first.
Now, It's been ported to many different language.


If Perl's the language that everyone's actively working to port things to, that seems like a pretty good sign that its in high demand.


@PerlDean No idea why Perl people always get so defensive, if i asked a Ruby developer the exact same questions i would get a straight answer and not excuses.

@Becker Maybe, or maybe its a desparate attempt to stay relevant without doing real work. After all Perl itself has not even been ported to the JVM yet.

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@Ada - I don't mind learning and using a 'dead' language like Perl. I am doing Perl for only a year, and it's fucking awesome - it is a hard to learn language having lots of traps, but I guess that is what will guarantee that salaries will not decrease to Perl programmers. Take a look at PHP - it is in high demand, but the market is full of shithead programmers. That is an easy to learn programming language, just like Ruby (although, ruby has some challenging constructs that might keep idiot developers away from it)

As long as in perl we have CPAN, perltesters, huge codebase in production, great frameworks and libraries (i don't care that most of them are inspired from other languages) and a vivid echosystem, I will use perl.

I am afraid that people call it dead, because they are not able to learn it and see its greatness and power. It is an old language indeed, but we have several releases/year - that alone means it is a live&kicking language.

If it is a dead language, why does most linux distributions come with it preinstalled and not with Python/Ruby/Java and why are the most sysadmin tools written in Perl and not ruby, or C/C++?

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libev is made by Marc Lehmann ( http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/ ),Who is a guru of asynchronous Perl moudles.

Project using libev.

Innovative!! Node.js ( http://nodejs.org/ )
Python - Twistd ( http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ )
Python - Gevent ( http://www.gevent.org/ )
Ruby - EventMachine ( http://rubyeventmachine.com/ )
Lighttpd ( http://www.lighttpd.net/ )


@Ada: hi Ada, do you mind giving an example of what you consider innovative and modern in your language of choice? In my experience, it's extremely hard to come up with new and innovative things to do as most interesting things have been done (software developers are clever folk afterall). And there's nothing wrong with borrowing/stealing good ideas... ruby is afterall a clone of perl right ;)

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