From: "Joe Schaefer" <joe_schae...@yahoo.com>
The original message that started this thread was:
"""
> One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP
> app
we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some
> buzzword-compliant consultants they are expressing concerns that the
> app's
underlying technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are
> becoming obsolete. They feel that a web application framework must have
'rails' or some other buzzword in its name.
"""
"Consultants" who don't contribute anything to this community aren't our
concern- nor should they be.
If they are consultants, it means that they contribute. The contribution is
not only made of code and POD documentation or translations, but also of
answers to the questions put by others.
Of course this question should be answered with language comparisons,
Hardly. What matters is the quality of the software and whether or not
it meets the customer's needs. There's nothing wrong with recommending
the "right" tool for the job, even if the "right" tool isn't implemented
in perl.
The question wasn't about the quality of perl, but the poster wanted to know
if Perl/Mason/mod_perl are obsolete.
A language could be very good but obsolete because there are other better
tools, or because other tools are prefered even if they are not so good, and
it could be easier to find programmers that use those new tools.
and of course that those answers should be based on our opinions and
experience,
because if there would be very scientific studies that show which of the
languages are modern and which are obsolete, which are good and which are
bad,
it could be very simple to find the sites with those scientific studies
using
Google and it wouldn't need to be asked on a mailing list.
Here is a good article written by Ovid - "Perl 5 is dying":
http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38010?from=rss
We should also remember that somebody discovered that perl 5 is dying 9
years
ago, and this was the thing that created the idea of perl 6, that should
be
totally different.
Languages don't die, they aren't people. People will continue to use
perl5 for the forseeable future, even after perl 6 is finally released.
"Die" is just an expression that wants to tell that the language is not used
by more and more programmers, but by fewer.
Octavian
