Re: [Nolug] RE: Perl User Group

On Fri, Jun 08, 2012 at 11:58:38AM +0000, Dustin Puryear wrote:
> You know, I've used perl extensively for a lot of projects. I love it. But I do kind of feel as though it were going out of fashion for "big" solutions. It's heavily marginalized to sysadmin-level work when compared with python, ruby, etc.

I can understand your feeling on this; but I think Perl is still the
sneaky giant in the background (much like FreeBSD).

The truth is that Perl is still responsible for generation billions (I
said it) of dollars a year in revenue. Take a look at the smattering
of companies that are sponsors for YAPC this year. Craigslist recently
donated $100,000 to TPF; cPanel and Bookings.com each donated $10k.
There is a ton of money the Perl is making people these days.

        http://yapcna.org/

This is a tiny smattering of companies that rely on Perl;
shutterstock.com alone reported 120 million in revenue last year.
cPanel has a nice income stream, though even working here I have no
idea how much that is. I know they pay me every 2 weeks and keep the
lights on.

Perl's strength is that since it's so closely tied to Unix systems,
it's the go to language for people who can build up an application
server /and/ program their great idea.

Python is suffering greatly these days. I've always considered it the
Fortran of scripting languages. Ruby is interesting and yields a lot
of great and creative projects (e.g., Puppet, Gitorious, Redmine,
etc); but ultimately, it's still a minor player.

The deal is that those who reach for Ruby or Python, do not know their
host systems nearly as well as those who reach for Perl. Perl
developers are a lot more likely to be able to set up not just a LAMP
stack, but an application cluster that can scale. They likely know
shell and cli better than their Python or Ruby counter parts, and this
really counts when you have to get something real done.

I love Perl, too; but my impression of it is that it's the ultimate
scripting language for Unix systems. And I mean Perl 5. I've been
around the wringer with people about why Perl 6 (which, again, I
really love) will never replace Perl 5 because their direction is
backwards. Unless Perl 6 is approached as an incremental goal of perl
(the Perl 5 blessed interpreter) to build up to supporting, then Perl
6 implementations like rakudo will suffer the same host-os-blindness
that most Python and Ruby programmers have.

That's just my take. Perl rocks. It always will.

Cheers,
Brett

>
> ---
> Dustin Puryear
> CEO
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> From: owner-nolug@stoney.kellynet.org [mailto:owner-nolug@stoney.kellynet.org] On Behalf Of John Souvestre
> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 9:33 PM
> To: nolug@nolug.org; neworleans-pm@pm.org
> Subject: [Nolug] RE: Perl User Group
>
> Hi all.
>
> I've been getting more and more into Perl. I see where there used to be a user group in New Orleans. Is it still active?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
>
> John Souvestre - Integrated Data Systems - (504) 355-0609
>
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Received on 06/08/12