Kal

I use perl, at home, at work, and I've been using it for over a decade. I recently switched job titles and had to relearn The Web outside of the old CGI forms that I used to know back in the crusty old days of web 1.0.

Handrolled mysql connections and 50k lines of code aren't good practice anymore - not that they ever were, but it was at least accepted and common practice. I've started using MongoDB as well, and its collection of documents metaphor makes a lot of sense when you can pair JSON and perl data types so easily.

Perl has moved on since the early 5.008 days, but the web itself is more like a glacier - slowly moving and slowly shedding the older cruft from search results, but at a slower pace than before. Searching for results will give you tutorials from the late 90s along side a tutorial from 2011 that both show a handle, because that old information is a polluting meme that keeps new learners learning the old information.

C/C++ with the new 2011 standard will face the same problem - new ways of doing things will be overshadowed by the glacier of static history for many years to come.

There are plenty of CPAN modules that stay updated, and new maintainers take over from the old. I haven't run across a module yet that hasn't worked, even if it wasn't updated in the last 4 years.

To be fair, I've been programming perl for years professionally as duct tape and glue, and I only recently decided to really investigate how far the language has come as I'm using it in a much more extensive project.

And in 2012, I finally learned how far perl has come in the last 4 years. The glacier is slowly moving on. I'm blogging about it, so I guess I am too.