>> proper OO without all that convoluted bless stuff
>
>Moose[1], and more lightweight versions in Mouse[2] and Moo[3]
I found all those frameworks, and hacking with inside-out objects to be too cumbersome and got in the way, so I just went back to blessed hashes. I liked to keep things simple.
> easy concurrency
I never got into Coro, but AnyEvent was wonderful to work with, and shaped my thinking in other languages... though you could get away with much more in Perl.
> ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP
I don't know how anything could be more ergonomic than Dancer (Perl's Sinatra equivalent).
> but I also feel like it wasted well over a decade of what should have been major advances
This, but thinking back at the time, I think what killed Perl was Google choosing Python. At the time, CPAN was the killer app and still had the lead vs all other higher-level languages. But then Google chose Perl instead of Python and as it was the hottest startup at the time where everyone wanted to work at, people started learning Python. Then the data scientists (except the geneticists) migrated over and NumPy, Pandas (and now TensorFlow) kept the momentum.
> I don't know how anything could be more ergonomic than Dancer (Perl's Sinatra equivalent).
My understanding it that they're very equivalent in many respects, and popped up at about the same time. Often they're mentioned together as modern options, I didn't for brevity and I'm familiar with Mojo. I think Mojolivious tries to require only core modules with optional upgrade to non-core versions if supplied. Not sure how that compares with Dancer, been a long time since I looked at it.
> I think what killed Perl was Google choosing Python.
Possibly. I saw that as the natural extension of "python is the new teaching language" stuff that started happening in colleges at around the same time, and I think that had a lot to do with it as well. I'm the end it's all about users, and new users, as old users have a natural attrition through finding other things that interest them (whether a new language or non programming pursuits) or retirement or even death. Without new users eventually the community starves. And even if you get enough new users to replace the old ones, without enough new to keep a relevant position relative to all new users, the language will be relegated to a slow decay. That is, even if perl had enough new users to replace old ones, the total programmers grew manifold over the last decades, and without a slice of that pie you're stuck as a has-been language, and eventually people leave due to the natural pull of popular and vibrant language communities.
I found all those frameworks, and hacking with inside-out objects to be too cumbersome and got in the way, so I just went back to blessed hashes. I liked to keep things simple.
> easy concurrency
I never got into Coro, but AnyEvent was wonderful to work with, and shaped my thinking in other languages... though you could get away with much more in Perl.
> ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP
I don't know how anything could be more ergonomic than Dancer (Perl's Sinatra equivalent).
> but I also feel like it wasted well over a decade of what should have been major advances
This, but thinking back at the time, I think what killed Perl was Google choosing Python. At the time, CPAN was the killer app and still had the lead vs all other higher-level languages. But then Google chose Perl instead of Python and as it was the hottest startup at the time where everyone wanted to work at, people started learning Python. Then the data scientists (except the geneticists) migrated over and NumPy, Pandas (and now TensorFlow) kept the momentum.