It seems to me the people who "aren't into Perl anymore" were not the gurus who built CPAN. Maybe it's fair to say that Perl isn't that into you, either? (All in good fun :)
NOTE: I'm not saying that perl is literally as obsolete as a horse & buggy but rather for most programmers to day it may as well be.
It helps to read the artice? Anyway, it's my goal to avoid "most programmers."
I wouldn't expect Hacker News to care much about the language, but rather what's being done. If you built a 10 story house would you be sure to mention what brand of hammer you used? I wouldn't, who cares. It's the act and the result that matters.
But regarding people who "bring Perl into every conversation," it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that. Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day," so I guess this is a kind of reverse nostalgia (things were worse back then)?
At most, the "naysayers" can't be any more than the perl advocates. No one is going out of their way to post articles against perl. We just come out when someone posts yet another perl advocation piece.
>Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
Liking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
>And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day,"
For all intents and purposes, perl's time has come and gone. Right or wrong, just or unjust. That's just how it is. No amount of wishing or screaming "look at this, we can also do Rails-type stuff!" will change that. Of course when someone posts yet another perl plea for relevancy, people who used it back when it was the language wax sentimental. You'd get something similar if you posted about some new project with OS2 or BEOS or something (arguably better technologies in their day then the one that ended up winning).
Some of them are language war trolls.
The rest... well, read some _old_ Perl code from 1999 or so (Nagios, maybe?). :-)
Modern Perl with the Perl 6 backports like Moose and other CPAN stuff is totally another thing.
I don't really know if it works better for most people to treat your computer language like something extensible, that can grow -- but still force people to learn old cruft, to handle that?
I know one thing: I love it, because it is fun. And I need that -- I hated my life when I worked for money in Java.
Edit: Grammar.