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Postings from June 2006
> I think these are a serious problem for the language and the > community. When college teachers are saying that teaching PHP makes > more sense because Perl is a dead language there is a problem. When > the people who should know better think that Perl 5 is end-of-lifed > because of Perl 6 then there is a problem. When the internal politics > of the Perl community lead to more Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt than a > focused Microsoft attack campaign there is something wrong. 100% agree. I can't see how people would say perl5 is dead because of perl6. I've yet to find people (generally outsiders) that have any faith in perl6 ... so their argument is even hypocritical. Sadly, though, its hard to convince them otherwise. I also think every language as its niche, and you should them were appropriate [well maybe expect the M$ ones :) ] I've even been in positions where I offered to do everything unpaid if I can do it and perl AND its not finished quicker and running faster then someone's Java/PHP with the caveat that they just have to give do credit and that perl helped them more then other languages. Interestly, 'suites' aka employer has taken me up on that yet. On the other hand, perl6 (as you know) will be able to run perl5... _EVENTUALLY_ it might even do it faster the perl5 itself. Perl5 itself is even moving towards perl6 internals (again I'm sure you know) There's actually been more developement on P5 in the last 1.5 years then there were 3-4 years ago maybe even combined. On the other hand, I'm hard pressed to find perl programmers even 'senior' ones that even subscribe to any mailing lists such as modperl@perl.a.o, or other user support lists for the language (forget the dev ones). Other people like professors especially (and I particularly despise this about them) is that they are HARD set in their ways. They generally also in CS department invented some famous data structure or algorithm and don't bother to keep current hence all the College classes are taught in Pascal, and Algo, but tested in Java. In 1998 when I started college (which will remain nameless; but, since I'm going to diss them, I'll point out their CS department was ranked in the top 20 in the USA), they managed to offer a SINGLE split perl/java class (2-3 weeks on perl). They didn't even do 'use strict'. The 'TA' even got the how to strip C style comments from a java 'like' file using perl wrong despite the fact that it is published by Tom Christanson. As of 2003, this particular college doesn't even teach perl anymore. much less C until your senior year. Its all Java. As a result all the conferences are largely Java based as there are 1000s more of them and they tend to be 'a dime a dozen' on the other hand, truly senior level perl people are in HIGH demand if watching jobs@p.o and talking to some of the Recruiting agents is any indication. The biggest thing I tend to hear is perl is an old language (perl 1.0 ~1995) well C is vastly older, but you don't hear anyone saying that. Even if development were to stop flat today, the large amount of infrastructure based on perl would take at least 5 years IMHO replace completely. Submitting more talks, I typically get them turned down on perl as the conference planners think the audience is too small, so I'm not sure that route will work. If you want to talk about politics, you can relate to the things the ASF had to deal with and managers saying they are going to report to government that httpd hacked their computer just from seeing the "hey its installed page" even after being told one of there 'sysadmins' installed it, or it came with the operating system. Just pointing out that some people simply don't care and don't care to know. I'm not actually sure what do to help this. I'm following p6, but not very closely... just enough to not be left out on a limb. Realistically though hard core development didn't start until 2004. Writing a language independent dynamic compiler with multiple front ends for a dynamic language with utf8 and threads support ain't easy to say the least. Somehow, that turned into a rant, so I'll state that my post has 0 affiliation with my current employer (Ticketmaster) I owe my lively hood to perl, so if I can lend a hand let me know how. P.S. Keep up the great work p5p! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip M. Gollucci (pgollucci@p6m7g8.com) 323.219.4708 Consultant / http://p6m7g8.net/Resume/resume.shtml Senior Software Engineer - TicketMaster - http://ticketmaster.com 1024D/A79997FA F357 0FDD 2301 6296 690F 6A47 D55A 7172 A799 97F "It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone, but it takes a lifetime to forget someone..."Thread Previous