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0 pointsmmaunder5y ago0 comments

I wrote a lot of popular web apps in Perl, some that appeared in NY Times and Time mag. I quit around 2010 and went over to php which is easier. Wrote a great app and built a successful software biz around it. I think 2010 may have been when Perl 6 felt hopeless and there was no clear leadership or direction in the community.

Mod_perl was the sh*t back in the late 90s for super high performance web apps on Apache. Then Perl stalled and everything else didn’t.

Perl could have been where Python is today if they didn’t take 20 years to waffle about a release that was supposed to do everything and ended up doing nothing because everyone left.

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cutler5y ago

What's also forgotten is the Perl community's endless procrastination in adopting a meta-object protocol (MOP) and the too-late arrival of Miyagawa's brilliant contribution - PSGI/Plack. These 2 factors, I believe, led to Perl being overtaken by Rails, Django and the various PHP frameworks.

devonkim5y ago

Perl’s lunch was eaten more by Ruby IMO. The bifurcation happened as the Perl programmers that wanted a more traditional OOP system picked up Ruby and the folks writing Bash++ oftentimes went to Python. These days it seems like Ruby is where Perl was in 2010.

JohnBooty5y ago

    These days it seems like Ruby is where Perl was in 2010

It's more "mature" than "abandoned" IMO. I think it's in a solid place. A lot of Rubyists have moved on but so far, that's OK with me.

Unlike OP's experience with Perl, most legacy Ruby and/or Rails codebases are not too disasterous.

orthoxerox5y ago

That's probably because Rails hits the sweet spot. It's just complex enough to support a medium-sized website well. Most innovations since Rails have targeted high-load websites.

user59944615y ago

mod_perl was dropped with the release of apache 2.4 in 2012 (that's a major release, apache is not semver). If I remember well, it was kicked out of the apache repo.

mod_python was also abandoned around the same time. It simply stopped being developed and stopped working (it's crashing on python 2.7).

Basically applications stop running inside apache memory with mod_xxx for good reasons (it's unstable and crashing both apache and the app). Languages moved to a FastCGI interface or to have a standalone web server.

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