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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

That's cool. I've used DDG a few times in the past and generally like so far. I had no idea it was done in perl though. It's nice to see new perl apps getting some press.

I wonder if they use any of the newer CPAN libs like Moose and family in the architecture?

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As for Moose, he (DDG author) answered this here

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder...

Having written an indexer in Perl for my current startup product, I really can't see the need for using something like Moose. I'm biased though, as I'm not a big fan of OO programming. I gave it a try in Perl years ago but it really sucked. OO programming that is, but I guess Moose was designed to fix this, but it's a little too late for me. I was taught C in school and I've learned to live without OO.

I can't say I disagree with him on the dislike for OO. However if you are going to do OO in perl Moose is the way to do it.

Moose is nice, but making your own objects can be pretty cool too. Try blessing a function ;)

If you agree with the design decisions. It's rather expressive, but not exactly a minimalistic approach to OO.

Did they ever improve the rather steep performance penalty? (esp. startup)

Runtime is fast, startup is not as fast.

I am not sure why anyone cares about startup time. I start my apps about once a month. 1 second instead of .1 second doesn't really matter. It's like saying, "C++ has an unacceptable performance penalty" because you have to compile your code before you use it. Yeah, you do. You can pay a million times at runtime or you can pay once at compile time.

For desktop apps, start them when you log in and connect to them via App::Persistent.

It's certainly worth thinking about if the app is a command line app. No one wants "ls" to have a 5 second startup time.

I agree. Please contribute your fix to Moose.

I believe he was responding to your "I am not sure why anyone cares about startup time." While you may have been referring specifically to Moose, it's possible to interpret that as a blanket statement for all programs and languages, even in context.

Especially when you're learning Moose, writing some more involved Unix scripts would be an option. It's not that bad for those circumstances, though. Personally, I just have problems wrapping my Perl style around more involved types of OO, so for Perl I'm happy enough with normal packages and procedural programming.

And as a side note, the compilation times for C++ made a lot of people switch to another language, although Moose is about a few orders of magnitude away from those kinds of problems.

I don't think he ever said he disliked OO. The comment after the reddit link are my feelings on OO.

I really can't see the need for using something like Moose

Well Moose is certainly getting traction in some big companies like BBC, Cisco, Hearst, Symantec and Yahoo.

ref: http://moose.perl.org/about.html

Like all things, I think it depends on the problem that you are trying to solve. Some things lend themselves well to having a nice abstraction layer while other times, this abstraction layer just adds unnecessary complexity.

I don't want this to turn into a C vs C++ debate but I do agree with Linus in that it's nice being able to just grep for something.

I agree, thats why I like using language like Perl because it doesn't force me into any rigid pattern(s).

But when it comes to OO i (nearly) always use Moose.

It's nice to see new perl apps getting some press

Some Perl press as appeared on HN before. For eg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565152 (though sometimes the Perl community have done their best to keep head low on this one :)

I think that's a natural combination. Both p-words showed me that there's more than one way to do things.

Yes Perl is definitely the Kama Sutra of programming languages :)

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