Perl 5.20 Released, and Mojolicious 5.0: the Very Modern Perl Web Framework 126
Kvorg writes: "Back in 2012 Slashdot noticed how at the time of Perl 5.16, the modern Perl projects, including Mojolicious, formed a new and expanding movement of a Perl Renaissance. With the release of Perl 5.20 and Mojolicious 5.0, the Modern Perl Renaissance is ever more striking. Faster, neater, sharper with its asynchronous APIs, Mojolicious is extremely flexible with its advanced request routing, plugin system, perl templating and hook API. Its adherence to the modern interfaces and standards and its implementation of advanced features in support tools, DOM and CSS selectors makes it easy to program with.
Mojolicious, with its philosophy of optimized code-generation (think metaprogramming), enabled-by-default support for encodings and UTF-8, zero dependency deployment with wide support for existing CPAN packages, zero downtime restarts and fully tested implementations, reminds us of how fun and flexible programming in scripting languages used to be. Of course, integrated documentation and a very supportive bundled development server don't hurt, either. The new Perl release with new postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations makes it all even more fun."
Mojolicious, with its philosophy of optimized code-generation (think metaprogramming), enabled-by-default support for encodings and UTF-8, zero dependency deployment with wide support for existing CPAN packages, zero downtime restarts and fully tested implementations, reminds us of how fun and flexible programming in scripting languages used to be. Of course, integrated documentation and a very supportive bundled development server don't hurt, either. The new Perl release with new postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations makes it all even more fun."
Awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't much care about what a lot of people think about it, I love Perl and still use it daily in my job. I've dabbled in PHP and the various frameworks it supports but I always find myself returning to Perl/CGI/DBI. But this sounds like something I have been waiting for. It's really nice to see some new stuff coming out for Perl 5 as I simply can't seem to wrap my head around Perl 6. This is great news for old dogs!
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think it would be funny as heck if.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that Perl (like C) requires discipline. It is possible to write well written and architected code in any language. But some languages make it harder than others. But some languages (Java, I'm looking at you) are designed to coddle programmers from doing things they shouldn't. It's silly because engineers should know their craft and not require a nanny in the form of a purposely limited language.
Re:A language that lets you do whatever (Score:4, Interesting)
That's one side of perl: The fastest development time imaginable for small programs. The other side, that no one has mentioned, is that perl conforms to the OO paradigm more closely than any other language (including Objective-C.) I have written very large programs in perl and contrary to popular opinion these programs are much easier to read and understand than if they were written in C++ for example.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Interesting)
Given I'll make more that $200K programming Perl this year, no that was not my first reflex...
My first reflex on seeing this on Slashdot was, "I probably shouldn't read the article because its going to be filled with the same tired, ignorant Perl hate. And then I'm going to waste time trying to respond to it."
You don't have to use Perl if you don't want to. Why isn't that enough? Why do you feel entitled to dump your FUD on my community? Perl isn't the most popular choice but there's a lot of us making a decent living at it, so please if you don't get it, or you don't like it, unless you have a grudge with Perl that hasn't already been mentioned 100K times what's the point of saying anything at all?
Re:That's not it. (Score:5, Interesting)
To expound on this point a bit deeper:
While one can write horrible code (without trying too hard) in any language (even python!), there *is* a rational reason that Perl tends to fare worse in this regard on average.
The reason is that, as compared to almost every other programming language out there, Perl was designed by a Linguist (as in, human languages) with an explicit goal of being very expressive. In many other languages, there's one canonical way to do a given thing, and then perhaps a few other ugly, horrible, slow, round-about ways to accomplish the same thing different, but most of the time everyone hones in on the same approximate language patterns.
Perl, on the other hand, was explicitly designed such that there are often many wildly varying different ways to accomplish the same goal, allowing for a great freedom of expression and stylistic choice. Over the years this theme has extended throughout the Perl ecosphere, well beyond the syntactic features of the core language itself, to the point that just about any programming style or paradigm can be wrought within Perl easily. Do you like C++-style multiple inheritance? Or maybe something more like Traits/Roles and object method invocation via message passing? How about functional style lamba stuff? Meta-object programming? Threads (of a few kinds), Processes, eventloops (of many kinds)? Declarative programming (with or without OO)? DSLs? How many flavors of templating do you want? Just about any real or academic-toy knob you can think of to twist which would affect how programming languages work probably already exists within Perl at this point. In this way it's almost like a modern LISP, but with a much larger standard library of language tools built on top, and fewer parentheses.
So you throw 50 "professional" programmers in a room with a Perl interpreter and ask them to solve the same high-level problem and you'll probably get 45 completely shitty implementations, 3 decent ones, and two brilliant ones. But not a single one of those 50 implementations will resemble the others much.
In the hands of a real artist, Perl is a very powerful tool for writing beautiful software, and it gives said artist the freedom to solve problems using the paradigms and syntactic styles that best match the problem domain without ever leaving the world of Perl. In the hands of a novice, however, it's way too much expressive freedom, and leads to basically-trashy, horrible code. Perl is programming without lane markers, seat belts, or brakes. There's nothing standing in the way of greatness, and nothing standing in the way of being a complete idiot, either.
Unfortunately, most programmers in the world aren't artists. They lack the innate skill, the drive and determination, or even the desire to become an artist. They're just doing a job and collecting a paycheck. Python is a great tool for these people, and Perl is not.