From: David Ihnen
Octavian Râşniţă wrote:
From: Mike Bourdon
> The hidden message here is “the more available senior developers, the
more likely available
> jobs”, an expanding talent pool will lead to an expanding job market.
I fully agree. What happends in the regions where there are extremely few
perl programmers, no matter if they are good or bad... we can imagine.
What can we do in order to promote perl in those countries/regions?
A programmers guild? Providing training, guidance, and advocacy in the
market?
There are almost no translated books for learning perl in my country, and
the editors are not very interested in printing perl books because they won't
sell well enough, and those few which would be interested would probably pirate
them.
Without books and without funds for promoting perl for beeing taught in
schools, perl won't have any chance in face of DotNet or Java.
> I think you've got it right there. We've got to get perl taught in
schools. That means perl experts need to be in teaching. And I have a
> suspicion that perl doesn't appeal to the pure computer scientist very well
- these are the people who invented hard typed languages, after all.
True. I know some guys that love math and all of them love more the strongly
typed languages.
Maybe I don't like the strongly typed languages because I attended a
university and a high school in business and economics.
> I tried to convince some programmers that Perl is better than PHP, but
without any success.
> How could they know, if they have never used it? I was far less convinced
that PHP was a blight on the face of scripting science until I got a
> job working in it, after all.
They know it because everybody tell them so. Most web sites are done in PHP,
most job offer for web programmers ask for PHP experience...
> Pay them to do it in perl, and after they get through the learning curve
they'll probably be much happier with it.
I can't tell that in my country there are no software companies specialized
in perl programming because I don't know all the software companies, but if
there are some, they could be counted on fingers, and they aren't probably very
big.
So who should pay those PHP programmers in order to motivate them?
Can perl programs run on share hosting web sites? There are some such
hosting companies that don't even offer perl support, and those who offer it,
offer just the standard Perl distribution, which don't offer a web framework,
or templating systems, or ORMS, or form processors, and in these conditions I
can't tell that perl is so great.
Isn't that to the denigration of the hosting company? Not supporting the
framework is no way to support your user base. As long as the dollar is more
important than the feature, there's not much we can do about this. These are
not things that should be built into the core distribution of a language, its
the main reason PHP is so awful.
I agree that those things shouldn't be built in the core distribution, but
there could be more distributions, like the one offered by ActiveState, or
Strawberry Perl or others, just as the Zend PHP distribution contains the Zend
Framework.
It could be helpful to have a perl distribution that includes the latest
versions of Template-Toolkit, HTML::Template, Mason, Catalyst,
CGI::Application, DBIx::Class, Moose, HTML::FormFu and other helpful cpan
modules.
A hosting company may want to install that distribution, and it would really
offer a much better support than the one offered by PHP.
Yes, those modules won't be updated frequently, but it would be much better
than simply a CGI.pm support.
> Can they hide the source code? (Because who knows who can get it from those
free hosting web sites)
> Who cares? Hiding source code is valueless.
Maybe in your country. In my country 10 euro means too much and actually even
1 euro means too much if the same thing can be got for free, legally or not.
> I found that they can hide it, but only after installing Open SSL and a
perl module, which they can't do, because those sites don't offer > root access
and neither shell access.
> You get what you pay for I guess.
Well, they can get a free support offered for Zend Optimizer (or how it is
called the Zend Decoder).
> In order to show them how good is perl, I told them that they would need
to have a dedicated server, or a VPS, but the cheapest VPS > costs much more
than a shared hosting solution, so in this case perl has another disadvantage.
> If they care that much about a few $ on a monthly fee for their web site,
they're not going to pay enough to get a skilled programmer in ANY > >
language, to do the programming.
Of course they care. If the same thing can be done cheaper using PHP, they
will surely choose PHP.
(The quality doesn't matter, because here the things are so fast changing,
and the easiness of maintenance doesn't matter for most, because who knows what
will happen after a few years.
> They've also told me that they know that perl is harder to learn than PHP.
> What can I tell them? That it is not true?
> Yes, but you may or may not be right. We all agree that coming into perl
is confusing - too much old data about how to do
> things is out there in the world. That makes it harder to learn - not
because the language is harder to learn - but because its not clear what the
proper way to learn it is.
I've seen that the newbies always want recommendations, and think that
there should be a recommended way of doing things, a best way.
Well, there is no such thing for perl. Perl is not a language, but it is
more languages.
If a programmer uses Catalyst and DBIx::Class and HTML::FormFu there is a
language, if he uses CGI::Application and Rose::DB::Object it is another
language, if he uses CGI.pm is another one, and there may appear other
differences if they use mod_perl or fastcgi or just CGI, or if they use classic
OOP or Moose, Template-Toolkit or Mason.
It is not bad that we can choose, but the beginners don't know what to
choose, and finally they would find all these confusing and start using RoaR or
PHP.
> Of course that I could have told them that for real good big projects,
perl is easier to use than PHP, but most of the PHP users don't
> care about that kind of projects. They care about simple projects created
from scratch, that don't even use a web framework or an
> ORM or a form processor.
> Sounds like the people who buy expensive fixed-lense cameras, then the
moment they get interested in photography discover that they could
> have bought an SLR, more capable and flexible, for the same price. But
they swore they didn't need the capability to do that when they >
> bought the original cameras, so now they're screwed.
Not exactly, because most of the PHP programmers don't work for themselves,
but for other clients, and yes, they would find that they are scrued if they
would need to update a program, but the really scrued is the client, because
the programmers will ask more money for upgrading that software, because they
would need more programmers to do it.
The good news is that some software companies started to see that this is a
problem and don't consider PHP a great idea anymore.
The bad news is that those software companies start to use more and more
DotNet and Java, and don't even think to Perl, because they know that perl is
harder to maintain, that perl is write-only and other things like these.
Yes, Perl 4 style of programming, or using CGI.pm might create code which is
harder to maintain, but there isn't a big software company that promotes perl
and tell them that this is not true anymore.
Octavian
