Confessions of a Perl bigot

Note

In early 2010 Frank and Jacob Kaplan-Moss hired me to consult at RevSys.

by Frank Wiles

Old Django dude who does a lot of Perl

  • Don’t flame him
  • We want dynamically typed, garbage collected languages

Afraid to give up his addiction to Perl

  • Didn’t want to give up his expertise
  • Lazy and did not want to learn

Outside observations

  • urlconf uses regex
  • Quality of his code supply is better
  • Good documentation
  • Lots of modules that don’t install right
  • Hands don’t hurt as much because pinkies aren’t used to grab the shift and obscure things
  • Seeing lots of startups using Rails and Django

Perl thoughts

  • Perl is a very insular community. Not as many blogs and articles in the modern methods
  • Django is moving upwards. Not yet stuck with legacy issues

What is Django missing?

  • Centralized repo a’la CPAN. We do have pypi.
  • Perl has more HOWTO type docs and blog posts on various topics. PyMOTW is a good example of what we need.
  • Dedicated Q&A website. Such as Perlmonks.org
  • Centralized user groups structure
  • Shared community hosting/infrastructure. Don’t we have webfaction?

Note

Back in the day I said webfaction but compared to djangozoom.com, ep.io, dotCloud.com, gondor.io and now Heroku, it is nothing!

Advice on having a Django addiction

  • Just say yes.
  • Best of breed.
  • Development speed versus app performance
  • Right level of coupling