And suddenly, you're hip
blogs.perl.org
blogs.perl.org
The buzz, the screen casts and other errata are a consequence of a lot of people making the same logical, reasoned choice and talking about it in public. I cannot think of anything that's changed in Perl that'd justify any such interest. I admit that may be my ignorance. Making sexy screencasts might get a little traffic but you can't astroturf wave of developer momentum with them.
> Vim's recent resurgence can largely be traced
> to development of Textmate grinding to a complete
> halt.
> Git beats seven shades of shit out of SVN.
> I cannot think of anything that's changed in Perl
> that'd justify any such interest.
And here's some constructive criticism for the aspiring Perl advocate: Stop talking in acronyms and obscure library names. What the hell is Moose and what real world problem does it solve significantly better than the popular alternatives?
Same for CPAN, frankly. Most people younger than me don't get it when you name-check CPAN. What does that stand for?Give me a killer app for CPAN, preferably one that people care about.
Note that the parent post speaks in use cases: Ruby is for problem X, Erlang is for problem Y, JavaScript is for problem Z. What is Perl for, and why won't Ruby work just as well?
> And here's some constructive criticism for the aspiring Perl advocate
Perhaps the Perl success stories should be mentioned more often, too:
Want to launch a one-man search engine? Perl makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...
Amazon.com, del.icio.us, Craigslist, the BBC? All have significant parts written in Perl: http://www.fischerlaender.net/perl/perl-used-for-web-develop...
How about Django, Evently, Moustache, CLOS, Hackage, Sinatra, Merb, OMQ as acronyms? ;) (None of it Perl..)
Anyways. CPAN _is_ the killer app. It's a HUGE, extremely easy to install module/library archive. Perl's modules aren't spread around everywhere but neatly and nicely collected there and you just do a "cpan Foobar" and get Foobar with all possible dependencies included.
Which is something what many languages (some still don't) have these days one way or another but really nothing compared to CPAN in number, service, search, testing facility and so on. You plainly _never_ have to bother searching your ass off to find some library you might need.
Moose is Perl's OO system - as with JavaScript you can do different OO styles with Perl and Moose is a framework to do a role/trait based (please see Smalltalk for details or Perl 6's spec) OO with a heavy twist on metaprogramming.
Perl is for writing things like Amazon or the IMDB and keep it running for 12 years in a row or for creating Nagios and SpamAssassin to watch over half of the Internet. Thanks to Perl, everybody can easily imagine what push, pop, shift, unshift on Arrays/Lists does and thanks to Perl everybody has very shiny Regex these days. That's why Vim has a magic/nomagic flag and what the P in PCRE stands for. The Ruby world gladly thanks Perl's DBI after which it modeled its own database interface.
That's what Perl is about. Sharing shiny features and establishing a culture of "getting things done who run really fast".
Sounds like Ruby's Gems: http://rubygems.org/ or even python's PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi ...
Haskell's system is called "hackage" for example and "R" has its "CRAN" and so on.
Though it's really no fair comparison as CPAN contains what.. 89033 modules? http://search.cpan.org/
89033 modules
Note I didn't say there is not such product/framework, just, as the articles says, they are not promoted/known.
There's a whole bunch of them, with different design goals or philosophies.
[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.
I'm not very familiar with PyPi since I'm not a Python programmer, but Gems pretty much work exactly like they should. Especially when you throw RVM into the mix.
Why do people keep trotting out this stupid pointless number. How much of that is duplication? How much of it is crap? How much of it is literally toys (e.g. ACME stuff)? In any case, Java has vastly, vastly more so any language that runs on the JVM automatically beats perl here.
99% of programmers will never notice any functionality missing in Ruby or Python that CPAN has.
Metcalfe's Law. The value of the CPAN increases dramatically with every addition, especially because of the maturity of the entire CPAN infrastructure: CPAN testers, CPANTS, annotations, reviews, dependency tracking, BackPAN tracking, gitpan, linked documentation, et cetera.
Demonstrably nonsense. Let me add a new module called ACME::DoNothing. What have I increased besides disk space and a meaningless module count?
The testing stuff is good and it's the direction everyone should be going but not having it obviously isn't too much of a problem because so few systems currently have it (CPAN was successful long before it had it as well).
The Perl 5 Porters mailing list has automated mailings which test CPAN against bleadperl to discover which, if any, commits break existing CPAN distributions. This helps p5p revert genuine mistakes and CPAN authors to patch their bugs.
I know that several minor revisions of other languages have broken several popular extension libraries.
Given human penchant to slip up and not realise problems until after they are encountered, having tests makes pretty much the difference between "science" and "hypothesis"
The fact that the cross product of several generations of interpreter, several platforms, and tens of thousands of distributions is generated automatically by a handful of volunteers is a strong argument for CPAN/Perl being unique amongst the dynamic languages in it's testing and compatibility.
Additionally, people who aren't in the right circles probably never know how much grepping through CPAN happens when new features and syntax is suggested for the core Perl5 language. All done by the porters to be sure that new syntax won't break existing code without some fore-knowledge. This is on top of the automated testing.
You can't really draw that conclusion. Other systems do not have it because it is not an easily solved problem, not because they do not think they need it.
Also, needing and benefiting from something are two entirely different things. Yes, no language actually NEEDS this kind of thing. But a language that has it is literally self-healing, since any kind of problem, be it breakages from dependencies, cross-platform issues or core language changes are communicated very rapidly to the developers without them even needing to make an effort.
CPAN is the only reason that I've kept my Camel book around since 2000, hoping that "someday" I'll learn Perl.
And most importantly: It provides you globalized automated testing on a variety of systems of anything you upload, through CPANTesters.
Just as an example: I uploaded a module yesterday and now it has 38 tests on as many different configurations already: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=CGI-Application-Plugin-T...
So not only gives it a very useful and otherwise extremely expensive tool to you, the developer, it also shows you this information about other modules, so it lets you gauge the quality of the modules you are considering to use.
Edit: Also, as an additional goody: The testing culture of CPAN allows development of ancillary tools that analyze the current state of CPAN and highlight modules that are having issues with their tests: http://analysis.cpantesters.org/ This can help generate bug reports for developers who don't have time to figure out exactly why a test failed on an obscure combo and they provide an in for CPAN-Newbies by pointing out to them which distributions could use patches.
Oh, and "It has MOAR!" isn't really a good argument. I've authored two gems, I think. Those are the only two times in two years of using Ruby that I haven't had the ability to just install the library that I needed.
(I loved Perl for years until I found Ruby, then never turned back...)
Perl was the hip thing back when those projects were being developed. If they were being made today, it's overwhelmingly likely that Perl would not be used (see Facebook).
Now.. CPAN.
Let me explain my latest round with fighting Perl/CPAN. I wanted a perl interactive mode. When I want to test out something in Ruby I use irb. In Python, I can type in `python` and enter interactive mode. Even PHP has a rudimentary interactive mode now.
So I try looking at `perl --help`. Nothing there. So I turn to google and find that I need a REPL whatever that is. So I try to figure out what a REPL is. Find that. Now I find that I need to run a little script to run Devel::REPL. Doesn't work. So I load up CPAN and type in `install Devel::REPL`. No less than thirty minutes later, 150 or so screens of noise, and at least 25 questions that I have to hit [enter] for I get a failed install. I have no clue what failed -- something to do with tests (the error is 4 screens back in the middle of even more text) so I try to force the install. I'm now 45 minutes into this and finally get Devel::REPL installed. I fire up re.pl and I get `SCALAR(0x100b81070) is not of type SCALAR at /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.9/namespace/clean.pm line 56`. All of this for a feature that should come with a base install.
This is just one example of why I avoid perl as much as possible.
perl -de0
which still seems to work.
If you want to email me (address in profile) I'd love to figure out what went wrong so nobody else has the same problem in future.
Maybe it's a question of perl putting a lot of things in CPAN versus other languages putting more in the standard library?
Have a look at cpanminus (http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-cpanminus/lib/App/cpanminus....). Its a lightweight and JFDI alternative to the default CPAN client.
Maybe it's a question of perl putting a lot of things in CPAN versus other languages putting more in the standard library?
Swings and roundabouts really because there is no definitive advantage in either approach.
Advantage in CPAN approach: Its more darwinian. Your libraries are more up-to-date (stdlibs often get stale)
Advantage in stdlib approach: Less dependencies. Batteries included out of the box.
After installing Perl first thing I do is load a few important CPAN modules (like Moose, AnyEvent, Coro, Devel::Repl, DBIx::Class) and then all your big loads are pretty much done.
:P
a) emacs vs. vim has been a holy war that has gone on since both were conceived and is a debate which is often older than the programmers discussing it. To be ignorant of recent language developments or internal acronyms is excusable, to be ignorant of vim/emacs is less so.
b) emacs and vim are not specific to any one language. Dropping acronyms that are non-specific to the topic (perl vs ruby, python, whatever) doesn't have some domain specific knowledge attached to it. If you're on either side of the debate, vim can be equally familiar or obscure.
Complaining about an article on perl.org not mentioning what CPAN is, is like complaining about an article on cars.com not mentioning what BMW is.
I haven't used perl, but I do use ruby and I'm learning haskell. What does CPAN do that make rubygems and cabal failures? They both work really well from what I can see (especially cabal), but since I don't know perl, my POV is obviously limited. What am I missing out on?
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Counting a library's worth by the number of things in it is probably not a good measure of its worth. But it'll be who knows how long before pypi or gems overtake cpan in terms of sheer quantity.
A better measure of worth would be a deathmatch showdown between seasoned perl people and seasoned ruby/python/whatever developers, where each can bring the powers of his libraries to bear.
But anyone who has had much exposure to perl people will tell you: never, ever underestimate them. They'll come at you with solutions to problems out of left field that solve the problem in 34 characters of self morphing regular expressions or something while everybody else is turning in comparatively huge 8 line readable programs.
Until other languages reach this kind of solidity and thoroughness in testing CPAN will stay at the top of the bunch.
Programmers are just likely to want to follow fashions as tweens - it's just that they're not so likely to admit it.
EDIT: (we're) not so likely to admit it.
And yet I'm still convinced that the choice of Git over Bazaar has something to do with the smoothness of Github and with "It's from Linus!", the choice of Ruby/RoR with the image 37signals so nicely projects, that JavaScript's recent rise and massive change in perception comes thanks to Douglas Crockford and Erlang would have probably stayed in its niche if it wasn't for CouchDB.
So I was surprised and amazed by the change in perception of Vim over the last year and therefore I blogged about it.
And yes, along your examples Perl faced a similar situation around 2000 (so thanks for the well chosen examples) and decided to do Perl 6 to re-ignite the Perl spark. (Let's set aside for a moment wether or not it worked and what happened after that and boy am I sure the second I hit the submit button people will _exactly_ totally get into this subject.. ;)
I also didn't ask wether or not one really wants the success of the masses or if it might be a good thing to stay in a well-defined niche with a community of your choice, creating your own culture - as for example shows the Linux distribution Slackware very happily year by year and to a great satisfaction of its users.
I also didn't mention how much it might have to do with the age of developers, wether some changes plainly might be a generation thing of "first generation web developers" and "second generation web developers" or how much Apple's regained success does play into all that.
But as we can see within the comments below, old Perl cliches aren't really dead and get repeated all over wether or not the subject was Perl's marketing and not Perl's qualities (or the perceived lack thereof...)
Or maybe we all get kicked our asses by Lisp next year - thanks to Peter Seibel's Practical Lisp Programming book or "Land of Lisp" and of course Paul Graham and Emacs wins all over. ;)
I think it might just be that emacs doesn't lend itself to screencasts or golf quite as much as vim.
Emacs has also had a really strong community for over 30 years (perhaps driven somewhat by the higher education roots). As such, I think it had a more firm underpinning than vim did, so more of the tutorials and such already existed.
I found the tools I went with to be more intuitive and easier to learn than the others. When tools are legitimately pleasurable to use, developers talk about them, and 'hype' builds up.
While I loved the language, I can't imagine going back to it. Now perl programs look like cat typing to me. It was way too expressive. The TIMTOWDI mentality meant that I could never read code I didn't write myself, and even some that I did. It was terse and dense like poetry and hard to understand - like poetry. To really "know" the language meant knowing a huge surface area full of exceptions and special conditions.
Sure, you could limit yourself to certain best-practices and styles but it was like being handing the keys to the porsche and told to only drive 35. At every turn, the language was begging you to flex that newly acquired knowledge of special syntax. The obfuscation contests, the perl poetry, the quines… Many languages have this failing in my opinion and it certainly matters more when you're working in a large team (hence, rigid boring old Java) but Perl taught me what it was like to go too far down that path.
It is what I would call a write-only language.
>>It is what I would call a write-only language.
I get a bit of vertigo, here...
You really left about a decade ago -- and don't seem to know much about what has happened since. But you have opinions?!
(If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book. [Edit: And as someone noted, chromatic's "Modern Perl" is good.] And so on.)
But the real joke here, are the upvotes. wtf?
Edit: For the third time... :-) "Write only language" is just trolling. PBP by Conway is the standard work on layout, variable naming etc etc. It is from 2005...
Also, of course I have opinions just like you. I told my story. And some people liked it and upvoted. I don't get why that deserves a "wtf" other than trying to rally people to downvote me.
To quote myself, re "write-only language":
>>If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book.
Was that really so hard? (I might add that PBP isn't directly new... Then we have Moose, which is the best OO system among the scripting languages, etc...)
Edit: I might comment on this part, that "po" added afterwards:
>>Also, of course I have opinions just like you.
Well, I don't go and write standard troll comments from ten years ago in language discussions...
Edit: If I should touch your point, too... the OP's complaints are literally about 1990s system administrators, which weren't really programmers. You'll get bad code in any language without coding standards, etc.
Perl doesn't bash you over the head and make you use objects by making "int" an object, but they're there if you need them.
( And if you really need to, you can make int at least look like an object )
where btw is A NICE HIP FEMALE PHRASE I COULD PRINT
ON A SHIRT?
"we" are literally invisible to the bigger public, not
matter how much CPAN grows and no matter how much #perl
is the biggest IRC channel on freenode.
Let them speak directly with core users from the very start.
-- User1235 has joined #perl --
user1235> PERL SUCKS 111!!!11!!1!!11!!
-- Chanserv set mode +o mst --
-- user1235 was kicked ( troll ) --
Not to mention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi
(NB: I do like both Perl and prog rock, so I personally wouldn't have problems with that.)
"The iPhone isn't the highest sold smartphone"
Sure it is. At least in the U.S., Japan, New Zealand and Australia. In most other countries, Nokia is the most popular smartphone vendor, but because they offer hundreds of different models, I doubt Nokia has one specific model that sells better than the iPhone 4.
[U.S.] http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/01/canalys-iphone-becomes-mo...
[Australia] http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr...
[New Zealand] http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/andro...
[Japan] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-cap...
[ IIRC, it might be the bug under: http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5100delta.html ; search for 'PERLIO_DEBUG' ]
Bottom line, CPAN is awesome ... but lets not be a one trick pony. When you hear things over-and-over you should probably take notice (and maybe even onus). "Perl is not newbie friendly, past or present (modern)", "Perl community is not friendly (rtfm)", "Perl is not used for the new web", "Perl has no good IDE", etc.
I'd like to see Perl restored to its former glory because it is an incredibly versatile language. IMHO, I think Perl developers need to develop more purty public-facing tools, e.g. Websites, Web Apps, Desktop Apps, etc. .. see Lacuna Expanse for example.
CPAN Modules are not public-facing (or are to a point) and do nothing towards altering the perception of Perl.
The idea of making tools that are joyful to use to the programmers (wether it's the programming language, the editor, the SCM...) is something that appeals a lot to me, and it's something that (unfortunately) Perl lacks, basically due to it's syntax.
The community around the languages also affects, both have a great community around with hundreds of incredibly smart people with it's own quirkinesses, but the Ruby quirkinesses are more appealing to me (think DHH or _why) than Perl's (think Larry Wall or all the JAPH/golf...).
Though the Ruby community managed somehow to drive off _why and someone like Zed Shaw if I remember correctly. If that really appeals to you...
if I remember correctly
No matter which of those reasons it was, it's pretty baseless to claim that he took down all of his websites, comics and open source software in a variety of languages including one he created due to some mysterious, unmentioned, irreconcilable beef the Ruby community, especially considering he was one of the most influentual people in defining that community.
>> "The idea of making tools that are joyful to use to the programmers ... basically due to it's syntax."
Thats pretty much entirely "who is working in this language" based imo. As for syntax being a limitation, its interesting you complain that, because others have complained that the syntax is too dynamic, too augmentable, and too unpredictable, hence people talking stuff about it being impossible to write a parser for it =).
Granted, often when this feature is used, its often abused, and there are various 'source filters' in Acme:: you'd get shot if you tried using them in production ( Switch.pm is one such shootable offsense ... with great power comes ... extra unwanted side effects ).
But an example of a Good use of the source filter/metaprogramming nature intrinsic to Perl is MooseX::Declare ( its only part source filter, but its "Sane" because its smart enough to not cause too many unwanted side effects ) to provide alternative class declaration syntax, that some would claim, even looks readable!.
use 5.010;
use MooseX::Declare;
class Foo {
method hello( $what ){
say "Hello $what";
}
}
Foo->new()->hello("World"); # Hellow World\nJust having CPAN isn't enough. There need to be new and interesting projects that stand on their own and are current and relevant. I'm not saying there aren't, I just don't read about them on HN, reddit, etc. Perl was always about making things easy, and it wasn't hard to see how a perl script was better than a cgi handler in C. How is writing a DSL interpreter in Perl cool compared to, say, Ruby? How do the Perl MVC frameworks make things easier/better than rails or django?
The differences boil down to details, architecture, stability, speed, security, documentation and the like - but seriously, do you really think some route handler in _programming language_ X or Y does make _any_ difference?
I personally didn't like the philosophy of RoR - I liked Merb better and got really put off by its community (and still am) and specifically by blog postings selling me shit as gold and all this "awesome <insert some simple basic not even well crafted solution to an every day problem here>" selling - but this is a matter of _taste_ and _personal preferences_ and don't really count as an argument.
Of course you can write a damn DSL in Perl in any way you like - otherwise a project like Moose wouldn't even be possible which wrote an entire metaobject OO system in Perl.
My point was that people usally plainly don't _know_ about those things and blindly think that PHP is the only language you can do "Web" with, Ruby the only language to write a DSL in and Python the only language well I have no idea what Python might be the only language for. ;)
EDIT: If Web 2.0 wasn't a well crafted marketing campaign I don't know what is.
(Before anyone follows-up with the usual "the right tool for the job", it's not the point here. There are good screwdrivers and bad screwdrivers).
> Also, Ruby is a better language than Perl.
http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html
you can download the PDF for free:
http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_letter...
http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_a4.pdf
this book follows and introduces modern practices/modules developed by the Perl community in recent years.
I hear this a lot about Python. And I know a little bit about Python; I know less about ruby. But the thing of it is, from a SysAdmin perspective, Python is where Perl was in 2000. In 2000, you had differing versions of perl that were close enough to step on oneanother, but still so incompatible that you had to maintain one version of perl for your base OS tools, and usually another version of perl for every major application you used.
Perl has stabilized to the point where this is no longer a problem. I can run nearly everything on system perl without worrying about it. Python, on the other hand, I've had to wrangle with many RHEL systems that have two versions of python (one, because the RHEL base system requires a staggeringly ancient version of python, and then the other for the application the server was running.)
Python just isn't "done" in the way perl is. In five or ten years, sure. But for now, it's still a pain in the ass.
Hell, I'd bet money that at this point, perl5 has fewer memory leaks and other programming errors in the compiler than Ruby does, just because people have been pounding on it for so long.
Just because you had a bad experience with Python legacy code (yes, RHEL sucks), doesn't mean you get to discredit the language. What is it about the language you find unfinished? I'd be 99% certain any issue you're going to mention is actively being worked on.
(Hint: I don't think the grandfather comment was about Python 3.)
And different languages doesn't say much. :-)
Perl 6, compared to e.g. Python 2/3, is a really ambitious undertaking. But OK, with the backporting going on, Perl 5 might end up being similar to Perl 6... :-)
Me, I'm not complaining about the large, predictable breakage you get when changing major versions, but the breakage that you got with minor versions of perl5 10 years ago, that you get with minor versions of python 2 today.
Ruby still lacks in scalability and speed compared to Perl
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...
These graphs tell me
1. Perl is slightly faster. 2. Perl uses much less memory on average 3. Perl uses less code.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
However, on Ruby18 you do have a substantially bigger problem:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
Lies, Damned lies.
It must be the spectacles you're looking through.
These graphs tell me that
- about the same number of Perl programs are faster than the Ruby 1.9 programs by about the same amount, as there are Ruby programs faster than Perl programs
- some of the Perl programs use half the memory of the corresponding Ruby 1.9 programs
- the Perl programs and Ruby 1.9 programs use about the same amount of code.
Only if you focus on a single number - the median - and ignore the complete overlap of the measurements shown by the boxplot and interquartile range.
Yet Perl 6, except from some blog posts describing its utter dominance over Perl 5 performance, still hasn't seen the coverage/promotion it deserves (I'm assuming here, because I'm not using it).
Maybe there are some lessons to be learned here.
To start: there exist Perl programmers who have worked on both Perl 5 and Perl 6, specifically to make Perl 5 more accessible and to make Perl 6 more imminent. Don't assume the entire Perl community is a hivemind with a single shared purpose.
I think the author misjudged why people like me choose Ruby and vim -- choices that have nothing to do with each other, btw.
I'm a fan of terseness and readability. Ruby has a reputation for both. I've never heard the following phrases spoken: "Perl is great for writing DSL's." "Perl is very readable."
The most amazing experience has been going on GitHub on day one, reading the Rails, Haml, Sinatra, Tilt, you name it, code and being able to understand virtually any part of it. This is not only a testament to the language, but also a testament to the quality of the frameworks and the API's that are being produced with it. Show me a web framework written in Perl that I can dig into and understand with zero Perl experience.
Vim, on the other hand, is a sour-sweet topic. Here is the only reason I'm using vim: everything else sucks ___. Vim also sucks ____ because in 2011 it is still a text editor that can't copy paste using the "normal people" shortcuts. I'm looking forward to the day I finally customize vim enough to match Notepad in usability.
As much as vim usability sucks, I know that I can spend a year customizing it (and it will take a year) and be able to rely on it for the rest of my life. In contrast, there is no such incentive to invest into the monstrosities riding over the JVM (not calling names).
Also, screencasts are great because I read all day and its tiring, physically tiring. Sitting back, relaxing my eyes and being educated while I sip on a coffee and have a cookie is my idea of fun. Screencasts are free, bite sized, training. By the author's logic Khan Academy is worthless as an educational tool because most of it is written somewhere.
I think delving into any web framework with zero language experience isn't going to be easy :)
However here are two Perl web frameworks which (IMHO) are easy to follow:
* Mojolicious - https://github.com/kraih/mojo
* Tatsumaki - https://github.com/miyagawa/Tatsumaki
" share clipboard
set clipboard=unnamed
" CTRL-V is Paste in insert mode
imap <C-V> "+gpa
" CTRL-C is Copy, CTRL-X is Cut, in visual mode
vmap <C-C> "+y
vmap <C-x> "+d
" Use CTRL-Q to do what CTRL-V used to do
noremap <C-Q> <C-V>:)
traditionally because if you are on a machine with limited memory vi, vim is the only editor that will load and there is no way you will get me using 'ed' again ~ http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html#id2963445