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by danieldon 5633 days ago

    89033 modules
Only 21694 distributions, though. The analogue in Ruby is a gem and RubyGems already has 19502.
1 comments

Ok. Shitload of lib err bricks. Great. Where are the prefab houses (frameworks) that help you get the thing done ... fast ? Perl has building blocks but lacks known products. Either finished products you just have to configure (like Drupal or Wordpress) or higher level building blocks (say Rails) that help you get where you want to get faster.

Note I didn't say there is not such product/framework, just, as the articles says, they are not promoted/known.

Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst (biggest and most enterprise one), CGI::Application, Jifty.

There's a whole bunch of them, with different design goals or philosophies.

I didn't there wasn't, just that the need better promotion. Call it screencast if you wish. They need Promotive Passionate Users.

[edit] I'm gonna pick a little bit on Catalyst and do a quick surface review at website level from a non-Perlist POV.

Homepage : ok, looks nice.

Documentation : uuh ! Dry redirect to CPAN. First impression before reading, it's not the doc, it's the API doc. Ah, wait a second, it _is_ the doc. Not very appealing and some things are so not obvious that it takes a note to understand it like "Note: Click on the heading in the previous line to jump to the actual chapter. Below is a "table of contents" for this chapter."

Download : Again directly to CPAN, at first sight confusingly looks like an API doc. For newcomers not versed in Perl it is not very friendly.

Community : not much to say, a good wiki with apparently interesting stuff to read. But the first thing you see is that the "Why Catalyst is an excellent web application framework?" is an empty page.

The perl community has every reason to be proud of CPAN. It's great tool but it's not the answer to everything. It's all therem but it lacks the last mile, the 20% of polish to make it a tad more friendly/attractive.

It's the whole point of the article I think. It's not to criticize Perl, just to say it needs a better marketing strategy.