Rails has finally done it! They have finally admitted what we as Perl programmers have said since people went all Ga-Ga over it around the launch of BaseCamp. In an unprecedented blog post, Zed Shaw, creator of Mongrel, totally turned his back on the Rails community, saying what I’ve heard in outside circles all along (from Zed himself):
“This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college. “
Perl is at a prime spot to step in here – this year, John Rockway published the first book on Catalyst, Perl’s answer to Ruby on Rails, in a much more Robust, more scalable package. Catalyst is stronger than ever. You see, I know some of the writers of Catalyst, and I know for a fact there is an entirely different mentality than that of Rails – Catalyst was built by Computer Scientists, and therefore was built by people who understand how an MVC architecture should be built!
My message to the Perl community is this – step in, do something! Promote the heck out of Catalyst now. Blog about it! Pull Zed aside, show him how it can help him, get him to blog about it. Ruby on Rails is weak right now, it’s breaking apart from the inside. Now is the time for the Perl community to show its strength and unite in an effort to make Perl once again the most used platform on the web! We need some big names in the Perl community to be stepping in here and taking advantage of the attention Zed’s bringing to Rails.
