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Comment by bionoid | Hacker News Reader

I cut my teeth on Perl back in the day, and while I have stopped using it completely by now, I am no hater. But this article does not contain the word "bless", and I wonder why it was left out. If I had to guess, it's not as easy to defend as the nice features.

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I think Perl not having OO built-in hurt it a lot when the trend towards OO started.

Of course Perl is more functional than OO so maybe it's time for a comeback now the pendulum has swung back...

Actually I think, it was killed by its strange standard library. A good base OO module in the standard, proper datetime modules, a good exception standard, proper iterators and the like, would have gone a long way to avoid the massive fragmentation which is CPAN nowadays.

Then another breaking factor was, I think, actually the long slow Apache 2 and mod_perl 2 migration back then, leaving Perl in one of the areas where it used to dominate in limbo for a long time as other alternatives like standalone appservers and the like simply were not very common initially, so there was no clear migration path. I still think, this was worse than the Perl 6 confusion.

In the end, we're now in some kind of downward spiral, where Python, Ruby, PHP have MASSIVE advantages in regards to the scope of their package repositories, while CPAN support of modern things, especially interfaces to Web APIs, is permanently half assed and unfinished.

You raise a lot of good points. I believe it is a combination of factors.

The Perl elite spent too many years futzing over whether to include a MOP (meta object protocol) in the stdlib and, if so, which one. Clunky Catalyst, with its weird subroutine signatures, was also no match for Rails, PHP and Django.

> But this article does not contain the word "bless", and I wonder why it was left out.

Most people use Moose (or its variants) so they don't have to bless things anymore.

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