[Novalug] Perl - PHP or religious wars?

[Jason Kohles]

On 3/7/11 4:20 PM, "Peter Larsen" <plarsen at famlarsen.homelinux.com> wrote:

>While Perl has a OO aspect added to it in later
>versions, I've yet to really see any programs in Perl that used it for
>more than just a single library.


It would be very difficult for me to come up with an example of a Perl
program that *wasn't* object-oriented.  Anybody that is writing
non-object-oriented perl programs that are more than about 20 lines long
is doing something seriously wrong.  I've been writing major applications
in Perl for over 15 years, and it's been more than a decade since I saw
anyone trying to write serious applications without objects.

By the way, The first object-oriented version of Perl was released in 1994,
a year before either Java or PHP was invented, so knocking Perl for not
having objects from the beginning is kind of low.  :)

Part of the problem is that Perl has been around so long that there are a
lot of people who have made an attempt to learn it, and so there is a LOT
of really lousy code out there that people find while Googling.  However,
there are also a LOT of people using Perl, it's far from dead and far
from obsolete.

Here are some places to start if you want to find out what is state of
the art in the Perl world today...

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"Modern Perl" by chromatic
http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html


Modern Perl is one way to describe how experienced and effective
Perl 5 programmers work.  They use language idioms.  They take advantage
of the
CPAN.  They're recognizably Perlish, and they show good taste and
craftsmanship
and a full understanding of Perl.

You can learn this too, whether you've dabbled with Perl for a decade or
someone just handed you this book and said "Fix this code by Friday."

You can get it in digital format for free at

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Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog
http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/

Modern Perl programming, circa 2011, relies on the collected wisdom of
the entire Perl ecosystem.  It's time to write elegant, reliable,
maintainable, well-tested, and predictable code.

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Enlightened Perl Organization
http://www.enlightenedperl.org/

Enlightened Perl is a membership organization which is built around a
movement within the Perl community.
                Its goals are complementary to the
Perl Foundation. Specifically, we support certain Perl development
efforts that ensure perl's future as an enterprise-grade development
platform.

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Moose: A postmodern object system for Perl
http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/

Moose is a postmodern object system for Perl 5 that takes the tedium
out of writing object-oriented Perl. It borrows all the best features
from Perl 6, CLOS (Lisp), Smalltalk, Java, BETA, OCaml, Ruby and more,
while still keeping true to its Perl 5 roots.

Moose is 100% production ready and in heavy use in a number of systems
and growing every day. Try it today!


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KiokuDB: Persistent Object Graphs for Perl
http://www.iinteractive.com/kiokudb/

KiokuDB is a Moose based object oriented persistence frontend for a number
of
storage backends.

KiokuDB focuses on predictability and transparency, providing quick, easy
and noninvasive persistence while minimising the undesired surprises caused
by naive serialization approaches.


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Padre, the Perl IDE
http://padre.perlide.org/


Padre is a Perl IDE, an integrated development environment, or in other
words a text editor that is simple to use for new Perl programmers but
also supports large multi-lingual and multi-technology projects.

Our primary focus is to create a peerless environment for learning Perl and
creating Perl scripts, modules and distributions, with an extensible
plug-in
system to support the addition of related functionality and languages and
to support advanced developers taking the editor anywhere they want it to
go.


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Mojolicious: A next generation web framework for the Perl programming
language.
http://www.mojolicious.org/

Back in the early days of the web there was this wonderful Perl library
called CGI, many people only learned Perl because of it.  It was simple
enough to get started without knowing much about the language and powerful
enough to keep you going, learning by doing was much fun.

While most of the techniques used are outdated now, the idea behind it is
not.
Mojolicious is a new attempt at implementing this idea using state of the
art technology.  


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I have considered starting up a NoVa Perl Users Group, if anybody was
interested
enough in Perl to read all the way down to here, let me know if you would
be
interested in such a thing.

_________________________________________________________
Jason Kohles, RHCA 
Palantir Technologies | Unix Systems Engineer
jkohles at palantir.com  | 703.957.5784
_________________________________________________________