Thank you for giving us, the Perl community, the benefit of the doubt. The world is big, and there's lots of room for intelligent people to have rationally based differences.

There definitely are: http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

And thats just those written in Catalyst (a Perl MVC web development framework). Thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt?

Or spending our time writing docs, blogs or more open source code to add to the vast opensource Perl ecosystem.

I'm glad mucking with Perl worked out for you. But there's a lot of modern Perl programmers turning out beautiful, terse and elegant code. So please don't globalize your experience. I wrote a Java applet once in 1995 but I don't keep saying that's all Java is good for.

http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.

So you are wrong in your guess that "80%" of Perl programmers are sysadmins writing cron jobs. Whoever modded you up should have done a bit of checking, because marking your opinion as insightful is highly inaccurate.

There have been several new Perl books written just for Catalyst in the past two years, so just because you are not finding anything new for Mason (which is probably not the framework of choice for the modern Perl programmer anyway) that is not much of an indicator. There's tons of FREE docs and examples for Perl in any case (http://search.cpan.org/)

As far as Google's lack of commitment to Perl, well, I'm sorry to hear about that, but that's one company. Google Appengine is a pretty small garden, and the Perl interpreter has trouble running under its confinement. To be honest, Python doesn't run everything under appengine either, you need to write code for appengine. I think getting PHP or other languages to run under it will be equally difficult.

If you want to program in Perl on the cloud you have a ton of options, such as EC2, Rackspace cloud and pretty much any cloud provider with an open system (not Appengines walled garden) Oh, and if you want a smarter search engine, trying http://duckduckgo.com/, which is written in Perl and I find more useful than Google search.

I realize that the Perl community needs to do a better job showing that we are not stuck in 1998, so I forgive your lack of knowledge in this matter. I do actually appreciate the opportunity to discuss it, since this is really the only way this perception problem with be solved. However I hope you can meet me halfway and do a bit of checking on modern Perl before you make such sweeping judgments again. Because to be honest this exact opinion you've expressed I've seen over and over again for several years, and it's totally different from what I see everyday, as a fulltime, highly paid Perl programmer for at least 15 years. Take a look at Moose (http://moose.perl.org/) if you think Perl's OO is lagging, or Plack (http://plackperl.org/) if you think Mason and mod_perl is all we have, for example. Our community is smart, diverse, highly active and strongly focused on the next 20 years of Perl.

John Napiorkowski

They got all this cash and... is there a code repository or something?

Hey, I'm a Perl programmer but I have little issue with the language choice, particularly pascal and python, as both were designed with teaching in mind. Java I'm so so on, personally I think its a bad idea but I'm sure Sun/Oracle is probably donated a crapload of free stuff to get their language on this list, so I guess its not unreasonable tradeoff.

If a police officer wants to find a lawful reason to stop you, he or she can almost always find one. You give the example of traffic violations as a case for when you can be stopped. However this is a very big doorway for cops since nearly everyone is speeding a little or has something that looks unsafe on their car. The law is designed like this on purpose, because we want to give cops reasonable leeway in investigating suspicious activity. However we have allowed this leeway with safeguards in place to in theory prevent abuse.

Anyway, cops have a whole book of tricks get around the 'lawfully investigate' stuff. For example, if you ever get pulled over by a cop the very first thing he or she will ask is, "Do you know why I pulled you over?" Nearly always you will feel tremendous pressure to admit something. This is human psychology. But if you admit to a crime ("Yes officer, I think I was going a bit too fast"), then that is basically giving up your right to be presumed innocent and opens the door for the cop to search your car or your person.

So don't say a cop can't walk up to a random person and demand papers. They can always say something like, "I observed the accused leaving a known drug house", or "When the accursed walked passed me I smelled marijuana", or "The accused was exceeding the speed limit", etc. And when the cop and the judge are working together you can end up screwed really fast.

I've thought for a while that the ejection of Facebook, the probably ejection of Google, etc., is all part of a face-saving Kabuki to give Chinese companies room to grow, now that Facebook and Google have proved the utility of their respective functions to large groups of people.

For example, without Facebook as competition, such functional facebook clones like 51.com, xiaonei.com, and chinaren.com are growing quickly, keeping both the service and the economic benefits of the Facebook idea within China's borders in a classic case of economic protectionism. Yes, the government can exert more direct control over them than they could over facebook, but at this point, that's kind of the icing on the cake.

Without Google as competition, Baidu (www.baidu.com) has that much more room to grow and take more tech jobs from the Indian economy and give them to Chinese. Yes, the government can censor more, but again, that's icing on the cake, since there are many other ways to maintain censorship and manage the population. Simply keeping things in the Chinese language and managing the traditional media go a long ways towards maintaining such control anyway, automatically excluding foreign ideas while keeping the frames (and therefore the conclusions) of major debates under control. Such a condition is not "censorship" in the strict use of that word, but this is the system used by Western governments to control discourse, even though they lack the self-isolating features of the Chinese language, so there's no reason why it shouldn't work here in China.

Examples of Western "censorship" can be found at sites like www.projectcensored.org, by the way. My point, then, is that, while censorship is important to the government, there's more than one way to accomplish it. There is only one way to provide economic protectionism, which is to divert more economic activity to local businesses, whether that be through tariffs, governmental spending, or what have you. Therefore, economic protectionism seems to me a primary reason for this kerfluffle, even though censorship may, of course, remain as a secondary reason.

This Google exclusion is all of a piece with the general economic protectionism with which China has been irritating ideologically "free market" types for a long time.

The current arguments over principle, then, can be viewed as a dramatically-colored veneer allowing both sides to save ideological face when the inevitable market protectionism takes place.

I'm glad your python experience is working out for you. My experience with major rewrites is that they tend to put a company out of business. So best of luck. However I don't believe the fact that Perl wasn't working for you any longer is proof that "People just aren't using it for anything more than 10-line throwaway scripts." Additionally, the existence or lack of existence of a Perl version 6 has not stopped the majority of working Perl programmers from continuing to improve and modernize the language they are using everyday. Perl, built around modern technologies such as DBIx::Class, Moose and Catalyst (see http://www.enlightenedperl.org/project.html for a good starting list of newer Perl projects intended to modernize the language) is powering many high traffic web sites. For a good list check out:http://dev.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

Highlights would include BBC iplayer (getting millions of regular hits).

So people are building new, high traffic websites with modern Perl, and continuing to add on and expand their existing Perl based websites. So if you already have a big Perl codebase, this is a great time to get involved in the community and see what we can do together.