Rails Maintainers (and Users), Take a Hint!
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It appears I’ve caused quite a stir in my post about asking Perl to step up. Joey DeVilla on Global Nerdy thinks I’m funny. Several Perl users, including Andy Lester (author of WWW::Mechanize) have corrected me on the fact that it does not require testing for modules to be submitted to CPAN - I stand corrected (I was writing this late at night when I wrote it, as I am now, so bear with me).
This still brings me back to my point that regardless of whether a module has to go through rigorous testing or not to be on CPAN, CPAN contains one of the strongest architectures to prevent bad code from being submitted available. When modules are submitted, they still have access to a large group of testers that will return test results to you and give you feedback. The Perl test suites included in the Perl packaging tools (Test::More, etc.) are some of the strongest unit testing tools I’ve seen.
Andy Lester himself is a great example of why I think Catalyst and other Perl tools and frameworks are much stronger than those of Rails, and have a much stronger and smarter group of developers maintaining them. He is the essence of a true “computer scientist” IMO. From his biography on O’Reilly:
“Andy Lester started with computers early by keypunching letters to Grandma on IBM 029 punchcards. Now into his third decade of professional software development, he’s the QA & Release Manager for Socialtext. Andy is also in charge of PR for The Perl Foundation and maintains over 25 modules on CPAN. Andy’s two latest book projects are Mac OS X Tiger In A Nutshell from O’Reilly, and Pro Perl Debugging from Apress.”
How many of the Rails programmers can say they keypunched letters into punchcards early on? Maybe a few, but I think Zed has a point. Andy himself isn’t a contributor to the Catalyst source code (that I’m aware of), but his skills and experience to me show the breadth of who a Perl programmer is, and the type of people maintaining the Perl Catalyst MVC Framework.
So I guess what I was saying in my previous article is that perhaps some of these programmers, such as John Rockway, Marcus Ramberg, and even Andy Lester or Larry Wall (whom everyone would take notice) should take this opportunity, now that it is in the public eye, to expose what Catalyst brings to the community - why should one use it over Rails? I’d like to see these guys show, through the experience and Computer Science backgrounds that they have, that Catalyst is one of the best options out there for building a scalable web architecture. I’d even suggest each address Zed himself, inviting him to give it a try!
As to the Rails supporters that were commenting, criticizing, and laughing at my “Perl Power” speech previously, perhaps you should step back and learn, rather than laugh at us. I know many of our own that are learning other languages, trying to learn from the Zed experience, trying to figure out how we can better apply principles that Rails brings into our own Frameworks, what works, what doesn’t - you get the point. Those criticizing what I have said, IMO, are simply further proving Zed’s point to an outsider like myself.
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Thanks for the kind words. I'm not sure I'm a computer scientist, but I do like to get stuff done. One thing I now need to get done: Update my O'Reilly bio since I'm no longer at Socialtext.
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Now you're claiming that no one with any experience hacks on Rails? And your example isn't someone who actually hacks on Catalyst, but on Perl modules? Wow, now who's the fanboi?.
It may surprise you, but there are plenty of experienced developers/engineering types writing ruby (and rails) code! Amazing, huh? Another amazing fact is that there half-baked former php'rs writing Perl code too! There just isn't quite as many of them since Perl hasn't been the 'cool new thing' for quite some time.
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One of the problems that Catalyst suffers from is its flexibility. It's good at handling the "boring" complicated applications that make us programmers lots of money, but it's not so good about being exciting given a 10 minute screencast or demo. People tend to get more excited about flashy HTML than they do about maintainable app internals, so I think this is working against Catalyst. (Still, we have tons and tons of users... but they're all so busy making money that they don't have much time to hype it up.)
I'm not sure about this, but it seems that the target demographic of Rails and Catalyst are a bit different, so maybe we're not really competing. Rails users want a quick-n-flashy app that works well enough, Catalyst users want a solid system for doing their own thing. TMTOWTDI, after all.
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Jonathan, those are some excellent points! I agree completely. I'd just love to see some evangelism on top of all that. I'm about to do a series on setting up a simple Catalyst app on here - hopefully I can help (although I am definitely not as smart as you guys!). I'm hoping to have money to make it out to Chicago this year - hopefully we can do another BOF session out there!
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