[cgiapp] Why perl lost steam...

[Bill Stephenson]

On Sep 21, 2010, at 12:57 AM, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:

> Looking at job statistics and activity in all the "web related" Perl 
> projects I think it's more a matter of this list being spectacularly 
> badly named.

That may be true. Jann Linder used to host and moderate an active CGI 
mailing list and I really enjoyed the community involved with it. Now, 
at www.perl.org there is no list described as devoted to CGI except 
this "Beginners" list. I'm not really a perl/cgi beginner, but I am far 
from being a perl/cgi expert too.

The CGI-App list is for the Framework it's named after and doesn't 
cover perl/cgi.

But this list is not the only one that's seen an active community 
evaporate. the MacOSX list did as well and it's not because it was 
poorly named. I miss these once active communities. I enjoyed the 
banter, the questions, the answers, and the occasions when I could 
help.

Personally, I think there was a pervasive trend a few years ago to 
write the shortest line of code, as opposed to the most human readable, 
and this is why perl code is now often considered obfuscated, hard to 
write, and even obsolete for most cgi (web) apps.

But perl code does not have to be any of those. Perl code can be easy 
to read, follow, and change. It's just a matter of style.

It might also have to do with a trend towards using an SQL database to 
store and retrieve date for web apps. I never jumped on that bandwagon 
either. I figured that storage would get cheaper and faster and so 
would processing power, so the efficiencies of database engines like 
MySQL would become less attractive than less complex methods like using 
CGI.pm's built-in "save" and "new" routines to store and load data. PHP 
may make it easier to deal with that, I don't really know, I never 
wanted to learn SQL, but the glances I've taken at PHP seem to indicate 
that is the main point behind it.

I'd offer that Perl became popular because it offered easy ways to get 
web stuff done, but a small, vocal part of the community seemed to 
embrace and promote complexity and actively chased away those who 
didn't embrace it with them. That could be wrong, but something 
certainly happened here.

It would seem that if the above is true than the way to fix the problem 
is to spend some time focusing on what made perl popular in the first 
place.

CGI::App is a great framework and it offers a lot to experienced perl 
coders who are creating large, complex, applications. But perhaps some 
work on smaller apps, for smaller businesses, would be appropriate too.

With that in mind, "Boulder" is interesting:

http://search.cpan.org/~lds/Boulder-1.30/Boulder.pod

I think I want to play with that a bit. It looks like it may offer some 
usefulness for creating small web apps that don't need the heavy 
lifting afforded by SQL database engines.

Bill Stephenson