About Catalyzed.org

Welcome to Catalyzed.org - a site dedicated to modern Perl as well as Catalyst development.

I recently stumbled on a very interesting article over at The H about the health of perl as a language. It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of time trying to fight the misconception that Perl is a legacy language, the cobol of the 21st century, etc. I've had lengthy discussions with colleagues who work in other languages, as well as clients and potential customers, trying to show them what I already know. Perl is alive and well. This is a hard sell.

Piers Cawley sums it up rather nicely in his article at the H:

Those of us who work with Perl know that it does not deserve the reputation as a legacy language. It has one of the most active developer communities of any language, and is the power behind many large sites.

This is the tragedy of perl. It was so easy to get started with that many people did so and left horrid piles of unmaintainable code for other developers to find and curse later. I've seen these piles of code in other languages as well, but Perl takes the win in a large part because Perl was available when everyone was getting started in web programming.

I don't see any point in rehashing what Piers covers quite well in his article, but it has brought me to a question. Why does a language with such power and vitality, with such an active community and cutting edge features, still have such a bad reputation?

I think the answer lies in Perl culture. The good Perl programmers out there, the ones really leading the way in Perl, tend to be much more focused on the work they are doing than evangelism. There is an attitude that is something along the lines of "If you can't work out how good the language is on your own, I'm sorry, but I'm too busy being productive to walk you through it." This is more true on the mass scale than the individual, as I've found those same people willing to go out of their way assist an individual.

So while there is a lot of activity within the Perl community, it's not readily visible to those not already in the community. This has been the problem I've faced every time I've had to talk to a client about why Perl is a safe language to build a system on. How do you communicate CPAN activity to a CEO or VP? How do you show them that the language is alive and kicking?

In a large part, Catalyzed.org was created for exactly this purpose. We want to cover the exciting things that people are doing in Perl, in Catalyst, and all the many other major modules that have and are revolutionizing the way Perl programming is done. We want to show just how much vitality is in the Perl world. We want to cover the success stories and talk to the people who are using Perl on a daily basis.

So that's what we are here for. As someone said: Information, Aggregation, Illumination.

Now it's your turn. You know what we're about, now tell us, What do you want to know about? Want to share a tip or favorite module? Want to point out a great post somewhere or suggest a site / blog for us to keep an eye on? Send them our way. Comment below, visit http://wiki.catalyzed.org/catalyzedorg/ideas or email us at: ideas at catalyzed org

Jay Kuri