Originally published in June 2011 on my previous blog. Fifteen years later the language has changed, the problem has not.
If one thing starts to bother me in the Perl universe, it’s all the dependencies which force you to pull half of the CPAN each time you try to install a major module.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Perl, I love CPAN, I love modules and I definitively love code reuse BUT may be we start doing it the wrong way.
Originally published in June 2010 on my previous blog, in both English and French. The Iron Man challenge is long over, but the diagnosis about a community’s duty to market its own language has aged well.
I came across a comic that illustrates well, to my mind, the issue with Perl’s popularity: XKCD: The secret of the Universe
Wherever the place I’ve worked, Perl was present to one degree or another, often in a crucial place, without its use being advertised or even known. I’ve long believed, that it was the reason why Perl wasn’t as popular as it could be, despite its use.