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About perl evolution/survival, an example
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From:
=?UTF-8?Q?Andr=c3=a9_Warnier_=28tomcat/perl=29?=
Date:
May 18, 2021 10:03
Subject:
About perl evolution/survival, an example
Message ID:
173f9d99-6a5d-fc0f-7397-0488e4cf2378@ice-sa.com
Hi.
I am assuming that the people on this list all share at least an interest in perl's
survival (or should I say revival?) as a programming language.
This message is also not an attempt at relaunching discussions that have already taken
place over the last year or so. But for a programming language to survive, and better to
prosper, it needs users and developers, at all levels.
And therefor, I find this kind of thing a bit of a pity :
If you search Google for "perl mongodb", the first result you get points to :
https://metacpan.org/pod/MongoDB
and on that particular page, almost the first thing that appears is the "END OF LIFE
NOTICE", and if you follow that link, you get another one to
https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-mongodb-perl-driver-is-being-deprecated
All of which is very nice, very considerate, and I have no truck (at the opposite in fact)
with the people who created and maintained this driver (and this documentation) in the
first place, and even the rationale behind the EOL notice seems eminently reasonable.
But it is a perfect example of how hard it is going to be to keep perl as a living language.
Mongodb is a very popular database product (and incidentally one which my company uses a
lot). I am also, since years, making a lot of efforts to promote the usage of perl by our
(young) developers.
In the last 2-3 years, we have developed a lot of software applications based on Mongodb
(and ElasticSearch), and because we have a large legacy of customer-oriented code
developed in perl (and also frankly because I like perl and CPAN, and also because the
alternatives which we have tried are worse), I have been pushing our developers to learn
perl and to continue to develop in that language.
But how can I continue to do so, if the first thing which appears when searching for a
perl interface to one of the most popular database systems nowadays, is this ?
Despite the kind offer of the original authors and maintainers, we do not have the kind of
people who could take over the development and maintenance of such a module.
So, what to do ?
Maybe this is just a question of perception. Searching CPAN itself for "mongodb" provides
a long list of modules which /could/ be alternatives to that first search result (but if
so, it is no immediately evident). It also provides a long list of modules which seem to
be themselves dependent on this now "abandoned" (orphaned?) basic interface module (which
is by extension also worrying).
If it is purely a question of perception and ranking when searching, should not someone
create a CPAN page with "disambiguation" for the "mongodb" search, considering that the
first result now points to pages which ultimately tend to paint perl as a language with
few interested users ?
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About perl evolution/survival, an example
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