Hey, I was on vacation for the last two weeks and get back to find more mail on
the Boston.PM list then it's generated in the last year! Wholey Moley! I was a
good monger though, and read all of it ... today. Compressing the entire debate
and all of the side threads, and the parody play, all into a single day can
really play with your head.
I would like to weigh in, but the whole "certification" discussion and
meta-discussion doesn't interest me that much. I really just wanted to relate
some of my own frustration with using Perl and trying to get Perl into more
places. I've love to hear how others deal with this.
First, I've never had a job that listed Perl as a requirement ... I just ended
up using it and that helped a lot. I do administration work in IT, and used to
work in a very Solaris / Linux -centric environment and now work in an almost
totally Win2k/2k3 environment.
In this setting, Perl isn't even considered a real programming language. It's
referred to as "scripting" as opposed to "programming", and while the
developers "program" in ASP.NET, I only "script" in Perl.
Some of the challenges I face in using Perl for advanced administration tasks,
is that it is considered a security risk and having it on production servers is
seriously frowned on by our network security analyst. Further, to do anything
"fancy" you need some modules from CPAN, and installing these modules would
mean QA testing, and a production roll-out with change form and managerial
approval. If you knew how many times I had to write my own (limited / broken)
version of a good code I could have gotten from CPAN ... well, I'm sure Larry
Wall is weeping out there, somewhere.
The other side effect, is that something that could be easily done in Perl
get's written as a DOS Batch script or as a VisualBasicScript ... because those
interpreters are ubiquitous on the servers. Hell, I've even written Perl
programs that create Batch files and then copy them to the target server, and
executed them remotely via psexec (from sysinternals.com) - all because I could
not get a Perl implementation installed on a production server.
Still, for all my whining and moaning, I spend about 75% of my time
programming, and about 90% of that in Perl. So, I may not be able to write
"developer" on my resume, but I do code day-in and day-out all the same.
One of the problems with "mind-share" is that the new guys they hired, right
out of BS/CS programs, don't know Perl and work in VB, VB.NET, C#, C++, or
Java. So, when I proposed using a (Perl based) Wiki for internal documentation,
I was shot down because, "after you leave, who's going to maintain it?" Still,
the new guys are beginning to use some Perl, primarily because of the DBI
module and the power of RegEx's.
Finally, for my own personal use, I've had several challenges in using Perl. I
maintain several websites (church related, volunteer basis) and began looking
for some type of free CMS. Doing everything via hand coded HTML/CSS just got
tedious, and didn't allow for any real "multi-author" participation. So, I went
looking for a Perl based CMS, hoping to leverage what I already know and ease
the transition. What I found shocked me! There were tons of open source CMS
packages written in PHP and Python, and little (that I could find) in Perl.
Further, where as Perl seemed to have the "here's the module, build it
yourself", the others (especially PHP) were able to brag, "upload this one
file, browse to it, follow the resulting install wizard!" I literally had XOOPS
(see: xoops.org) installed, running, and themed within about an hour. Where is
the Perl equivalent? Before anyone says "What about Mason!", let me say that
"HTML::Mason" is a far cry from XOOPS in ease of installation, m
inimum
time to working web. Of course, I have little experience with Mason, perhaps
there is something simple and obvious I missed - if you know better, please
share!
The prospect of wading through tons of OO PHP code in order to customize a CMS
is disheartening. Having to learn Python just to use some of the great Python
based CMS's is even more depressing. I just wanted an easy to use, easy to
set-up and install, easy to theme, Perl based CMS. Further, (believe it or not)
I don't have shell or root access to the hosting web server. Some compromise,
somewhere, needs to be made!
Anyway, my rant isn't going anywhere except maybe as a cry for help. Does
anyone else want or expect fully formed Perl apps for web deployment? Maybe if
there were more then just little Perl "scripts" for quick CGI tasks like hit
counters or guest comments, more novice programmers would use and learn Perl
instead of starting off with PHPBB or something and going that direction.
Finally, a word or two about programming languages and learning new ones. I
like Perl, I use Perl, and I can do some pretty cool stuff in Perl. I don't
want a "broad" knowledge of programming, I want a "deep" knowledge. By which I
mean, I don't need to be able to write { print "hello world!\n"; } in a dozen
different languages, I want to explore deep CS problems like genetic
algorithms, deeply recursive data structures, or self-modifying code. I don't
want to keep learning how to do the same things in different dialects, I want
to learn how to do totally new things in the dialect I already know. In a
perfect world, I'd be paid (well) for being really, really, really good at
programming in a language with broad capacity and that I like - Perl. In the
real world, I have to go out and learn Java (which I have so little interest
in) because that is what is being asked for in countless job postings.
Well, that's my take anyway.
~runester~
PS: I'm excited about trying "Oddmuse: the Wiki Engine", see: www.oddmuse.org
... and it's all Perl, baby!
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