mojo

e lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to flourish.

a hit over the last n years population wise. In addition, the Perl community has, anecdotally, a reputation for being a bit terse [1]. Nothing cut and dry here, but again nothing that stands out IMHO. Did you actually read that link, or just read a section title and assume it made your point? Because the author updated that section saying that he really can't talk much on that point, because he wasn't there, and the evidence shows it to have been fairly civil. That said, Sebastian does have a bit of a reputation for being "terse". But that's one person. Since when does one person define a whole community? > 2. Libraries : by extension of a diminishing pool of active contributors, it stands to reason some modules may not be as actively supported as their counterparts in other languages. This is compounded by the uncertain state of the language's version (5,6,7?) You have a lot of assumptions, and are using them as the basis for more assumptions. How much has the community decreased? What percentage of the community that are still active are contributors of modules, compared to similar communities of other languages? Or, just look at some data: https://metacpan.org/recent Feel free to change the filter on the left to new distributions, not just new releases, to get an idea of how much active development is going on. It may be more or less than other languages, but I think what's shown should be sufficient to disabuse you of the notion that no development is going on. As for the the version number, this is a non-issue. There is no issue of version numbers, it's a solved problem. Some people in the community occasionally bring it up because it's a sore spot, and it gets a lot of play in the tech media sites, but it's really rather simple (if different than most other languages). Perl 5 is Perl 5, and will stay so unless someone forks it and competes. Perl 6 is a new language, intended as both a successor and a companion to Perl 5. People are NOT expected to migrate Perl 5 code to Perl 6, it is a different language. This has nothing to do with the state of the language's future. Perl 5 is still being developed. Perl 6 is still being developed. Both are available, and useful, for specific subsets of uses. For Perl 6 that happens to be a somewhat smaller subset currently because of performance issues, and some portions of the spec still being fleshed out (this is a different discussion). > 3. Language : I personally have enjoyed coding in Perl, and am not really too intimidated by its historical warts. It's quite possible to write readable Perl, so write-only accusations are of little concern (to me). Agreed. > * Versioning : As an outsider, the current state of Perl's versioning is confusing. Perl 6 has been in development for over a decade, and I've seen mention of Perl 5.2 being released as Perl 7. None of this reflects positively on the language as a whole as it raises concerns about future proofing and maintainability. Blame tech media sites for taking an internal community discussion, misunderstanding the state of things, taking random suggestions from people as real community movements, and playing it up for page views. I'm sure we can agree the media isn't infallible. I'll agree that Perl 6 is unfortunately named. If you know the eventual goals (Perl 5 interoperability) the name makes a bit more sense, but it has caused some in the Perl 5 community to feel constrained to a version number (thus the talk of Perl 7). In the end, this is a marketing problem (which is why you see it from the outside). > * Mojolicious : Looks nice. My only concern would be that, based on the GitHub commit history, it is overwhelmingly governed and contributed to by a single individual. More so than even Rails, and significantly more so than Django. This isn't necessarily a negative, but I'd certainly want to trust him before building a production app using his tool. There's a fair number of other people that have committed[2], but I won't argue the impression that it looks to be primarily Sebastian (even if there's supposedly 4-5 core developers, according to changelog notices). That said, from your earlier link that explained him leaving the core Catalyst team[1], he started Catalyst, so he's got some experience in this area. I feel fairly certain others would step up to the plate if he couldn't commit as much. [1] http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2012/10/why-people-d... [2] https://github.com/kraih/mojo/contributors

language and it took a while until I understood how others work. Meanwhile I know a number languages and have seen various ways in which you can design a language. I can see why many people shun Perl. However, the main reason possibly is that the don't understand what it's concepts are about. They are very different. One can possibly compare this with the situation when you switch to a functional language, like Haskell or when you haven't used OO before. Like with all languages I really recommend to learn it. Even, if you don't use it Perl _will_ widen your horizon. Two tips, if you do: Modern Perl, is probably the best book for learning and it's available as a free online book (wish I had something like that, when I started). There are many very outdated and even completely wrong tutorials. Oh and "use diagnostics;". It will take a while until you see it's flexibility, but it is like Perl would be a language inherit (or assimilate) all paradigms and concepts or like always had them and they were just slumbering. Well, of course there are other things like CPAN that make Perl great. Yeah, other languages have similar facilities, but they don't come close. It is really great and they all have lots of tests and there are a lot of "CPAN Testers" that report problem. And when you want portability you'll love it. It runs on _very_ exotic platforms.