Unresolved issues

... for making perl hip and trendy again.

Community

• Many perl channels on IRC are between moderately and exceedingly hostile to newbies. While changing them all is an exercise in futility, it would be nice with at least one channel where people can get live support for Perl without having to face humiliation.

• There's a very significant amount of people in the upper echelons of the Perl community who do not want Perl to be a popular language. They say they feel anything that would encourage more newbies to use the language would be bad for the language. Personally (Debolaz speaking), I think this the basic human need to feel that one is special, and using a special language is a part of that. And when a lot of people use your language, it's no longer as special. Imho.

• Many programmers seem to be uncomfortable with the concept of image and marketing. A frequently encountered opinion amongst programmers seems to be that people should appreciate how fantastic something is without it having to be marketed to them. That they should somehow just magically realize that Perl is great. (Even though they'd probably deny that they think this if asked in that particular way)

• Certain module maintainers can be very difficult to work with but has a lot of knowledge that is very valuable to the community. While this suggestion might sound a bit formal, we might want to establish a process for working with these people and act as "shock absorbers" between them and the rest of the community.

Technical

• There's no good object oriented exception system for Perl available on CPAN, which makes the people who do use object oriented exceptions often reinvent the wheel. Strangely enough, they always create the same new wheel, suggesting it's not a matter of individual requirements but rather the lack of an alternative on CPAN.

• An effective IDE for Perl is currently limited to <insert favourite text editor with somewhat working syntax highlighting here>. It would be a good thing if more generic development environment started supporting Perl, since most of them already support both PHP, ruby, and python. Currently, the only generic development environment that has somewhat good support for Perl is Eclipse, and many people don't feel comfortable with Eclipse. There is also an editor which specifically supports Perl, Komodo, from ActiveState, which costs $295 per user, and is aimed at commercial users.

• CPAN.pm is starting to show its age. It's not the kind of tool newbies are comfortable using, or for that matter, many seasoned professionals. CPAN.pm doesn't neccesarily have to go, but an alternative should exist. And CPANPLUS isn't enough.

Documentation

• There aren't really any good ways for newbies to learn object oriented programming in perl. In other languages, they are spoon-fed object oriented thinking from day one. The current perl object tutorials teaches them wheel reinventing syntax and that's it. What's needed is documentation (ideally free, for greater distribution (think Beginning Perl), though understandably probably not) that speaks OO/Moose from day one.

• While there is a "Perl Best Practices" book, it's not in a state in which we can blindly entrust it to newbies. We need a better collection of actual best practices.

This page needs more concrete information, for example: If CPANPLUS isn't enough, why not, and what is? (I assume something with a GUI, that shows deps, etc? elaborate!) castaway