[sedachv]

"Why does Perl 5 need a Rails?"

So O'Reilly can sell books about it.*

"Despite the existence of Rails, Perl 5 is still more widely used than Ruby."

Who is writing new projects in Perl 5? Ruby will also have a lot of legacy code in five years.

* If you thought that was a joke, you're still missing the point.

[chromatic]

If you thought that was a joke, you're still missing the point.

I suffer no illusion that their sales numbers have any correlation to the popularity or efficacy of a technology. Their Ruby book sales crashed in 2007, for example.

Who is writing new projects in Perl 5?

I know of many, many new projects written in Perl 5. So far this year I've worked on three and have another later in the year.

[sedachv]

"I suffer no illusion that their sales numbers have any correlation to the popularity or efficacy of a technology."

I guess all that PR and advertising from dozens of publishing, training, analyst and consulting firms is a giant waste of money?