use Perl

According to the blog post by its creator Gabriel Weinberg it runs on Perl. We don't hear often about successful new projects running on Perl so the more stories like this the better.

I am fond of indirect object notation.

It's the my $inst = new Class::Class arg => 42; thing.

It's beautiful and I've never faced any unsolvable problems with it. All arguments against it basically sum up to it being too hard to parse properly. As if we got computers not for this exactly reason — to do hard things for the sake of beauty (which is a special case of order).

This is a shortened version of my mail to Perl events mailing list.

The Devconf 2010 conference is over and here are some after-thoughts of mine.

I'd like to have a rough estimation of the number for a talk.

First, my own educated guess. We have:

1. ~4800 active CPAN authors (from here).
2. 1% to 5% of Perl developers release code to CPAN (my own evidence from working in big and small companies).

This gets us (optimistically) ~500000 Perl developers in the world.

Then I did some research^H^H googling:

Here's a simple service to search CPAN and github from one page: CPAN Hubble.

It tries to move good github results to the top of the search results page.

There are several known issues with it but please provide feedback here if you find it as useful as I do.

C Gearman server does not retry jobs if a worker returns failure.

But it looks like we can trick it to retry by dropping connection from worker.

TheSchwartz would be great but it looks dead. Brad Fitzpatrick is in the valhalla of Google, last release was in 2008 and cpantesters report more failures than successes.

gearman is not reliable. It won't retry jobs on another worker nor workers can return failed jobs.

There's a new site by Mark Keating from UK: Presenting Perl. It's reportedly based on something called IdiotBox(?!).

There's also YAPC.tv which is more attractive. It also has more features, e.g. RSS feeds.

A questionable, but interesting nevertheless article in USA Wired mentions Perl:

...tweets about Lady Gaga’s lingerie can help someone debugging Perl code. (Or a tweet about Perl code may help Lady Gaga’s underwear stylist.)

Perl culture is in dire need of fresh showcases and new success stories. When someone asks about desktop software written in Perl, FrozenBubble usually springs to mind and then what?

I think it's very cool that Shutter is written in Perl with all kinds of GNOME goodness like using GooCanvas based on Cairo, installing a notifying icon and being a «Made on Ubuntu» software.

I was researching into scientific activity metrics and calculated the h-index for all CPAN authors as an experiment (I used CPANDB by a very high h-indexed CPAN author).

I'm publishing one of the tricky questions I ask when I interview people for Perl developer positions.

"Tell me about .. and ... operators? How are they different? How do they work in different contexts?" © skv++