From: "Matt Pitts" <mpi...@a3its.com>
-----Original Message-----
From: Octavian Rasnita [mailto:orasn...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 7:56 AM
To: The elegant MVC web framework
Subject: Re: [Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development
From: "Ali M." <tclwarr...@gmail.com>
> When Catalyst is not chosen I personally believe it the combination
of
> two things
> 1. Perl is no longer perceived as an easy language, or language that
> make development easier.
More exactly,, Perl is considered a language hard to learn, that
creates a code hard to maintain, a language that uses a strange OOP
style (because I guess there are no books for Perl beginners that
teach
about Moose or Mouse), a language which is too flexible and because of
this it is not prefered by the large teams of programmers because each
of them could have a different style.
> 2. Catalyst perceivably doesn't offer enough added value for
> developers who are not that much into Perl
> to make the sacrifice and use Perl anyway.
If the programmers are "not that much into perl", this means that they
don't know how to use DBIx::Class and Catalyst and possibly other few
modules which are usually used by Catalyst developers, and in that
case
they can't understand the power of Catalyst.
If Catalyst wants to compete with RoR or other frameworks, it should
be
as easy to install as those frameworks, and the simple apps should be
also very easy to create.
The comparisons between web frameworks are not based on the number of
the requests they serve, or on the number of database tables they
manage, or on the number of backend servers they are installed on, but
on the number of web sites that use those frameworks, so those
comparisons might show that there are 100 sites that use RoR and only
5
that use Catalyst, but don't tell that 3 from those 5 sites that use
Catalyst have 3 times more visitors than all those 100 sites that use
RoR.
And of course, the conclusion is that RoR is much better.
I think that the success of other languages, especially Python is also
due to the fact that they support better Windows than Perl.
WxPython is better developed than WxPerl, there are even screen
readers
that interact with the GUI of the OS in Windows and Linux, and
finally... the number of programmers for Windows is bigger than the
number of programmers for Linux.
Most Perl programmers use to consider good to publicly despise Windows
and those who use Windows, and also consider that Perl is a language
for the web, while those who use Python or even Ruby consider them
very
good languages for creating programs with a desktop GUI.
Sad to say, but I completely agree with this. It's quite ironic how the
drive of open source has only furthered the need for OS agnostic
software and platforms, which in turn, has actually made life harder for
things like Perl that have strong origins in *nix OSes.
"Oh yeah, we love Linux as a platform for its [list of goodies], but we
can't ask our day-to-day workforce to switch desktops, so we need OS
agnostic platforms that we can build in Windows and deploy in Linux."
Seems to be the credo echoing from the business world.
I myself am currently trying to support multiple developers (content &
perl) working on a Catalyst app from Windows desktops and it's been a
bit of a process. Cygwin seems to be providing the best solution right
now, but Cgywin Perl fork()ing breaks frequently for me in Vista, so no
HTTP::Prefork, which makes development much, much slower.
I really, really want to be able to "just run" my Cat apps in Windows,
and I probably could get it going under ActiveState or Strawberry if I
stuck to it, but I _need_ it to not be that hard. I'm sure I'm not the
only one.
In today's world of software that is cross-platform and OS agnostic at
its core, Perl 5 is showing its age. Still love it though.
v/r
-matt pitts
As someone said it many years ago (but I don't remember who was), Perl is
dead... or something like that was the idea.
With that ocasion came the idea of creating Perl 6 that should be totally
different, but who knows when it will be ready.
A better native OOP support in Perl would be wonderful, but I think those
other ideas about how Perl 6 should look like are more important, like to
have a kind of virtual machine like in DotNet or Java, and to use bytecode
precompiled binaries which are totally portable.
Octavian
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