Hacker News Reader

Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

The comments here are great and answer the question in various sensible ways, but I slightly wonder... could Perl make a comeback if it got its own Rails equivalent? You could argue that Laravel has done a lot for PHP (though of course PHP never went into the wilderness in the way that Perl did). Perl 6 seems to have a lot of magic in it, and I wonder if any of that could be usefully leveraged to make something very modern, very clever, and very Rails-esque that actually might get people interested in using Perl 6.

(See also Phoenix and Elixir.)

View on HN

It's hard for me to describe how much Perl 6 doesn't need another web framework, but someone to actually use the ones that already exist! There is even already more than one middleware solution Crust and P6W.

https://github.com/ufobat/Bailador

https://github.com/tokuhirom/p6-Crust

https://github.com/skaji/Frinfon

https://github.com/nunorc/p6-Pekyll

https://github.com/retupmoca/P6-Web-RF

https://github.com/drforr/perl6-App-prancer

https://github.com/sergot/BreakDancer

https://gitlab.com/samcns/uzu

https://github.com/supernovus/perl6-web-app-ballet

https://github.com/zostay/P6W

Testing https://github.com/azawawi/perl6-selenium-webdriver

Even desktop style web applications with Electron https://github.com/azawawi/perl6-electron

It's all there just no one engages with any of the development because its not trending on HN every five seconds or has the eye of the tweener set of developers who blog and vlog.

Thanks for your rude reply.

None of these seem to be anything like Rails - they look much more geared towards the Sinatra/Flask micro-framework crowd. People didn't start flocking to Ruby because of Sinatra (not that there's anything wrong with Sinatra).

Thanks for your projection of rudeness... Makes me feel extra special given I spent about ten minutes linking all that stuff.

Baliador is meant to be a take on Dancer from Perl 5 which is somewhere between Sinatra and Rails in complexity. In the Perl 5 world the equivalent of Rails would be Catalyst. But even that isn't really as monolithically well integrated.

The point I'm making is Rails wasn't built in a day and to date Perl 6 has had quite a few people want to kickstart a Rails initiative but they always do it with new code and new ideas cloning a previous paradigm. A better plan is to embed yourself in what's there especially the core language. With grammars you could write a complete DSL as a web framework with all of the power of Perl 6. But it would take someone knowing the core language well to make something that's slick. For behind the scenes there is little reason to reimplement HTTP parsing/serving since there are a couple of modules that are tested against every release of the Rakudo compiler already.

Maybe the problem is there are too many. Some of us just want to pick a leading best-practices solution quickly. Which is more of an agreement with your first statement than a contradiction.

The part about trending every five seconds was gratuitous and overlooks the point that using something with broad community engagement has huge benefits, as people share their issues and solutions, and things get fixed and stay updated with the input of a large community, the power of which exceeds that of any one developer.

Plenty of things trend often on HN with very little community or support existing to date. They are still heard about frequently. The reason is the community understand how to get attention in a way that engages your average dev. It's that engagement rather than intrinsic value that is important. Programming languages essentially all do the same job. Convincing someone a wheel is rounder for your road at home is mostly about spin (and puns). I think it's safe to say the Perl community are not as good at this as they used to be say in the 90s or 00s. Another issue I think that many people overlook is ageism exists in tech. As you get older you are likely writing less code and managing projects or doing some design for others. At that point many of the tech decisions that are lower down are made by younger generations who also want something new, because the assumption at the moment is new tech is better tech. Which for the most part is sort of true.

I know it's dumb but for some reason the large amounts of Rails people moving to Elixir bother me. I don't want the language to be synonymous with web devs :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com