In 1999, Perl was the first programming language I truly explored. The beautiful language confirmed my passion for web development. By utilizing CGI and mod_perl, I contributed to building scalable websites during that time. I loved it.

However, my frustration grew with the community the more I used it. While other languages were trying hard to ease their ecosystems, and shine them up, I felt the Perl community were happy with where they were, and saw no need for change. Status quo, and that was that.

I was using Perl Catalyst at a job back in 2011. I went to visit a friend in a startup incubator and I saw him execute a "git push" from the command line. It pushed his whole Ruby on Rails app directory to a Hook environment. I was blown away. It changed my life; I quit Perl that day, and moved over to Ruby. I had read nasty comments on RoR from the Perl community, but really they missed the point: it let developers just focus on development. Perl Catalyst was powerful, but the documentation was very weak, and just to get it installed on a machine took so much manual intervention, and time. I once asked questions about best design practices for custom libs, and was met with scorn on an irc channel.

I type this with nostalgia, as I love Perl so much, however, I wish the community just helped with the toolings, and kept up to date with the demands.

submitted by /u/tess_philly
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