Worth A Consideration

While reviewing the Ironman feed I came across this post by chromatic that lead me to review these slides by Stevan Little.  I think its worth a look and not an immediate dismissal, which I can understand since previous projects to modernize Perl have not exactly met minimum goals (no offense to any of these projects, but as a working programming who also has a life with other interesting things going on, I really only have time for frameworks that I can actually use on the job).

I think its worth consideration given where its coming from.  Stevan Little has not only had tremendous impact on Perl (I've in the past mentioned that Moose is the project that kept me in the community) but also as someone running a consulting company and providing various programming services, not just Perl, he's in a great position to help bust up the bubble/echo chamber we often have going in our community.  

I don't currently have the Scala chops to really help, but I'm going to take up SL's challenge of programming more outside of Perl.  In the past (1990's) I probably spent at least half my time using Javascript, it was only around 2006 when I tended to use Perl closer to 80% or more (this was more a function of the jobs I was offered and my interest in the Perl community than any negative feelings toward Javascript as a language.)  So in the future don't be surprised to see more blogs covering Javscript.  For now I'll be concentrating on client side Javascript, probably either enyo.js or dojo which are both projects I find quite interesting.  I'll be blogging about that as well, along with my Perl work.

Additionally I have a further challenge which I will pose to myself and to all of you.  Stevan said Perl tends to be too much a bubble or echo chamber.  I would further add that often the echos I hear compromise of a single person or tiny group.  People blog, but seldom comment on other blogs.  We as a community don't have the habit of getting into converations about design patterns, or programming theory.  We are social enough together, but we don't really build and communicate our thought ecosystem.    Knowledge of core aspects of Modern Perl such as object design, web application development, evented code and all that are not well dispersed in our community.  As a result our applications tend to resemble state of the art from 10 years ago, and innovations tend to not be broadly understood.  For fun I started a Catalyst application, just to show something off, and you know what, that application looks nearly identical to the very first Catalyst application I did many many years ago.  Now, you can't say that the industry and theory hasn't changed, since it clearly has.  What has happend is that our conversation and expectations have become anchored by whatever documention happend to be put together first, and seldom evolved from that initial posting.

As a someone that loves Perl I have to say it really sucks that I end up reading blogs on node.js to better understand nonblocking code and its possible uses, pro and con, or I end up reading blogs on Rails if I want to engage in a conversation about modern MVC.  So I'll be trying this coming year to comment more other other's blogs and to reblog the ideas I hear.  I hope some of you do the same.  

Comments

[Niceperl]

I totally agree with you. Stevan++

[thomas sabo]

I feel pretty good, and support you.