use Perl

• my $opinion; (Score:1)

  by phaylon (6115)

  I'd say it's a modified version of the first: "You can't compare applications and languages." Developers seem to tend to contribute more to application projects than languages. In fact, one of the things I like about the Perl way is that CPAN tends to smoothen the line separating both.

  --
  Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley
  • Yeah, apples and oranges (Score:2)

    by Simon (89)

    I'd agree that you can't compare. The major difference is that Perl activity is the sum of the people working in Perl and the people working on Perl, whereas with an application, you're just looking at the people working on it - not to mention that the people working in Perl are much more diverse and harder to measure. The total developer activity could well actually be about the same between Gnome/KDE and Perl.
• GUIs (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  I completely understand why GUIs attract so much attention. That's what initially attracted me to Web programming and is one of the reasons why Perl disappointed me when I first got into the language. GUIs are tremendously important, but serious programmers often dismiss them because so many GUI creators are so terribly bad at it that they produce pretty piles of junk. Those who appreciate the power of a GUI can produce tools that are tremendously productive, but they aren't as "sexy". For example, GUI
• People are more interested in the layers near them (Score:1)

  by Alias (5735)

  I think it has to do with closeness.
  
  People don't care in general about things they can't use directly. They do care about the things they use directly.
  
  Case in point: PPI vs perlcritic
  
  PPI is a generalised parsing module for Perl, perlcritic makes the actual judgement calls and provides the actual interface to users.
  
  I think it would be a pretty fair call to say there's FAR more interest and excitement and debate about perlcritic than about PPI.
  
  As a tool/component, PPI has a potential worldwide direct userbase
• KDE and Gnome glorious joyfullness dissatisfaction (Score:1)

  by scrottie (4167)

  
  Hmm.
  
  Speculating wildly...
  
  Work done on related projects has a good chance (at least in the mind of the programmer) of being included with the main project provided they work hard enough and do a good enough job. I use this mini-law to explain Linux's popularity over BSD even though BSD was far more mature, stable, clean, and complete -- Linux actually benefited from needing work. It adopted programmers, so to speak, and then they became part of the family. Conversely, in Parrot, it's harder to imagine a s