October 12, 2004
"I tear my hair out at the Perl community's apathy towards PHP's onslaught"
An anonymous commenter just replied to my entry on PHP overtaking Perl:
As an intermediate Perl web developer I tear my hair out at the Perl community's apathy towards PHP's onslaught in the web development world. Don't you realise that it's Perl's mindshare that PHP is sapping? Who do you think is going to be using Perl when all the UNIX sysadmins have grown too old to bang away at a keyboard all day?Perl6's response - more complexity and obscurity. I don't hear anyone addressing the problems deploying Perl in web hosting environments. We don't need a better mod_perl. We need a replacement for it that doesn't give sysadmins nightmares if they throw it onto a shared server.
To give you an idea about how bad the PHP replacing Perl phenomenon has already become, I recently contacted Paul Dubois, first congratulating him on his excellent "Perl and MySQL for the Web", then asking him why, 3 years later, it is still the only book to counter the truckload of PHP/MySQL books. He then confessed that the book sold very badly. Can you believe it? The Perl community has 1 book on Perl/MySQL and no-one wants it.
I contacted Alison Randall at O'Reilly begging her to find someone to write a Perl/MySQL web development tome or, even better, a Perl/PostgreSQL tome. At least something aimed at web development with Perl and a database. Her reply? Ther isn't a market for it.
What does this tell us about the Perl community? My prediction is that Perl's user base will dwindle back to the bunch of UNIX sysadmins who gave birth to it .... and that's from someone who's first language was Perl and who considers it far superior to anything Rasmus Lerdorf of Zeev Suraski has produced.
Perl has a serious problem deciding which niche it wants to fill. Those interested in swiftly throwing shit at browser windows have moved on to PHP. Those striving for clean, object oriented architecture are now busy writing Java, C# or recently Ruby.
Frankly I don't see much future for the core language that is Perl 5. Its language constructs are too crufty for the ages we live in. Even something as simple as subclassing a package, or declaring subroutine parameters is awfully awkward.
The one killer application that Perl and only Perl has, is CPAN. There's is nothing remotely like CPAN on the planet. But I digress.
