Perl 5.20 Released, and Mojolicious 5.0: the Very Modern Perl Web Framework

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."

Re: People still use Perl?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

You shouldn't be surprised by the inexperienced having all their attention taken by the shiny and new.

A language that lets you do whatever

[duckgod]

The thing that I have always loved about perl is the "there's more than one way to do it" philosophy. Perl lets me do whatever the fuck I want. If I am doing a project for my own enjoyment then I will do whatever I want that gets the job done the fastest. Yes maybe this makes it a bad language for large groups and production applications where programmers need to have restraints in order for the group to work harmoniously. But I am an adult and I don't want to be told what is right or wrong way to do something in my home.

Oxymoron

[canadiannomad]

Ok, I know I'll get modded down to oblivion for this, but my first thought on reading the headline was "Modern Perl Web Framework, isn't that an oxymoron?" Any others think that as a reflex at first too? Even if you don't really believe it?

I know I used to love Perl, but that was a long time ago...

Re:That's not it.

[nmr_andrew]

The problem isn't that perl is old. The problem is that perl reads (and writes) like encrypted sanskrit...

I really wish people would stop saying this. It's certainly possible to write horribly obfuscated Perl, deliberately or otherwise, just as it's possible to write C, or Python, or anything else in a nearly unreadable way. I'll grant that Perl maybe allows you to get away with a bit more.

However, it's just about as easy to write clean, maintainable Perl as it is in any other language. Follow good coding practices and you'll have clean code, code badly and it'll be a train wreck regardless of language.