ground group growth hands

This past year of blog­ging has intro­duced me to a wide vari­ety of peo­ple in the Perl com­mu­ni­ty. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their pub­lished work, and even more I’ve met” inter­act­ing on social media and oth­er forums. So this will be the first in an occa­sion­al series high­light­ing not just the code, but the peo­ple that make up the Perl family.

Paul LeoNerd” Evans

I first came across Paul’s work dur­ing his series last year on writ­ing a core Perl fea­ture; he’s respon­si­ble for Perl v5.32’s isa oper­a­tor and v5.34’s exper­i­men­tal try/​catch excep­tion han­dling syn­tax. I inter­viewed him about the lat­ter for Perl.com in March 2021. He’s been active on CPAN for so much longer, though, and joined the Perl Steering Council in July. He’s also often a help­ful voice on IRC.

Elliot Holden

Renowned author and train­er Randal L. mer­lyn” Schwartz linked over the week­end in a pri­vate Facebook group to Elliot’s impas­sioned YouTube video about his day job as a Perl web appli­ca­tion devel­op­er. Through his alter ego Urban Guitar Legend Elliot is also a pas­sion­ate musi­cian; besides gig­ging and record­ing he’s been post­ing videos for nine years. (I’m a bit envi­ous since I took a break from music almost twen­ty years ago and haven’t man­aged to recap­ture it.) Elliot seems like the quin­tes­sen­tial needs-​to-​get-​shit-​done devel­op­er, and Perl is per­fect for that.

Gábor Szabó

Gábor is a poly­glot (both in human and com­put­er lan­guages) train­er, con­sul­tant, and author, writ­ing about pro­gram­ming and devops on his Code Maven and Perl Maven web­sites. He’s also the founder and co-​editor of Perl Weekly and recip­i­ent of a Perl White Camel award in 2008 thanks to his orga­ni­za­tion­al and sup­port con­tri­bu­tions. Last year he intro­duced me to the world of live pair pro­gram­ming, work­ing on a web appli­ca­tion using the Mojolicious frame­work.


If you’re on Twitter and look­ing to con­nect with oth­er Perl devel­op­ers, please con­sid­er par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Perl com­mu­ni­ty I’ve set up there. Twitter Communities are topic-​specific mod­er­at­ed dis­cus­sion groups, unlike the free­wheel­ing #hash­tags sys­tem that can be dilut­ed by spam or top­ics that share the same name. Unfortunately, they’re still read-​only on the Twitter Android app, but you can par­tic­i­pate ful­ly on iOS/​iPadOS and the web­site.

Look, I get it. You don’t like the Perl pro­gram­ming lan­guage or have oth­er­wise dis­re­gard­ed it as dead.” (Or per­haps you haven’t, in which case please check out my oth­er blog posts!) It has weird noisy syn­tax, mix­ing reg­u­lar expres­sions, sig­ils on vari­able names, var­i­ous braces and brack­ets for data struc­tures, and a menagerie of cryp­tic spe­cial vari­ables. It’s old: 34 years in December, with a his­to­ry of (some­times ama­teur) devel­op­ers that have used and abused that syn­tax to ship code of ques­tion­able qual­i­ty. Maybe you grudg­ing­ly accept its util­i­ty but think it should die grace­ful­ly, main­tained only to run lega­cy applications.

But you know what? Perl’s still going. It’s had a steady cadence of year­ly releas­es for the past decade, intro­duc­ing new fea­tures and fenc­ing in bad behav­ior while main­tain­ing an admirable lev­el of back­ward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Yes, there was a too-​long adven­ture devel­op­ing what start­ed as Perl 6, but that lan­guage now has its own iden­ti­ty as Raku and even has facil­i­ties for mix­ing Perl with its native code or vice versa.

And then there’s CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: a continually-​updated col­lec­tion of over 200,000 open-​source mod­ules writ­ten by over 14,000 authors, the best of which are well-​tested and ‑doc­u­ment­ed (apply­ing peer pres­sure to those that fall short), pre­sent­ed through a search engine and front-​end built by scores of con­trib­u­tors. Through CPAN you can find dis­tri­b­u­tions for things like:

All of this is avail­able through a mature instal­la­tion tool­chain that doesn’t break from month to month.

Finally and most impor­tant­ly, there’s the glob­al Perl com­mu­ni­ty. The COVID-​19 pan­dem­ic has put a damper on the hun­dreds of glob­al Perl Mongers groups’ mee­tups, but that hasn’t stopped the year­ly Perl and Raku Conference from meet­ing vir­tu­al­ly. (In the past there have also been year­ly European and Asian con­fer­ences, occa­sion­al for­ays into South America and Russia, as well as hackathons and work­shops world­wide.) There are IRC servers and chan­nels for chat, mail­ing lists galore, blogs (yes, apart from this one), and a quirky social net­work that pre­dates Facebook and Twitter.

So no, Perl isn’t dead or even dying, but if you don’t like it and favor some­thing new­er, that’s OK! Technologies can coex­ist on their own mer­its and advo­cates of one don’t have to beat down their con­tem­po­raries to be suc­cess­ful. Perl hap­pens to be battle-​tested (to bor­row a term from my friend Curtis Ovid” Poe), it runs large parts of the Web (speak­ing from direct and ongo­ing expe­ri­ence in the host­ing busi­ness here), and it’s still evolv­ing to meet the needs of its users.

clear light bulb planter on gray rock

Twitter recent­ly rec­om­mend­ed a tweet to me (all hail the algo­rithm) tout­ing what the author viewed as the top 5 web devel­op­ment stacks.”

JavaScript/​Node.js options dom­i­nat­ed the four-​letter acronyms as expect­ed, but the fifth one sur­prised me: LAMP, the com­bi­na­tion of the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apache web serv­er, MySQL rela­tion­al data­base, and Perl, PHP, or Python pro­gram­ming lan­guages. A quick web search for sim­i­lar lists yield­ed sim­i­lar results. Clearly, this meme (in the Dawkins sense) has out­last­ed its pop­u­lar­iza­tion by tech pub­lish­er O’Reilly in the 2000s.

Originally coined in 1998 dur­ing the dot-​com” bub­ble, I had thought that the term LAMP” had fad­ed with devel­op­ers in the inter­ven­ing decades with the rise of language-​specific web frame­works for:

Certainly on the Perl side (with which I’m most famil­iar), the com­mu­ni­ty has long since rec­om­mend­ed the use of a frame­work built on the PSGI spec­i­fi­ca­tion, dep­re­cat­ing 1990s-​era CGI scripts and the mod_​perl Apache exten­sion. Although general-​purpose web servers like Apache or Nginx may be part of an over­all sys­tem, they’re typ­i­cal­ly used as prox­ies or load bal­ancers for Perl-​specific servers either pro­vid­ed by the frame­work or a third-​party mod­ule.

Granted, PHP still relies on web server-​specific mod­ules, APIs, or vari­a­tions of the FastCGI pro­to­col for inter­fac­ing with a web serv­er. And Python web appli­ca­tions typ­i­cal­ly make use of its WSGI pro­to­col either as a web serv­er exten­sion or, like the Perl exam­ples above, as a prox­ied stand­alone serv­er. But all of these are deploy­ment details and do lit­tle to describe how devel­op­ers imple­ment and extend a web application’s structure.

Note how the var­i­ous four-​letter JavaScript stacks (e.g., MERN, MEVN, MEAN, PERN) dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves most­ly by fron­tend frame­work (e.g., Angular, React, Vue.js) and maybe by the (rela­tion­al or NoSQL) data­base (e.g., MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL). All how­ev­er seem stan­dard­ized on the Node.js run­time and Express back­end web frame­work, which could, in the­o­ry, be replaced with non-​JavaScript options like the more mature LAMP-​associated lan­guages and frame­works. (Or if you pre­fer lan­guages that don’t start with P”, there’s C#, Go, Java, Ruby, etc.)

My point is that LAMP” as the name of a web devel­op­ment stack has out­lived its use­ful­ness. It’s at once too spe­cif­ic (about oper­at­ing sys­tem and web serv­er details that are often abstract­ed away for devel­op­ers) and too broad (cov­er­ing three sep­a­rate pro­gram­ming lan­guages and not the frame­works they favor). It also leaves out oth­er non-​JavaScript back-​end lan­guages and their asso­ci­at­ed frameworks.

The ques­tion is: what can replace it? I’d pro­pose NoJS” as rem­i­nis­cent of NoSQL,” but that inac­cu­rate­ly excludes JavaScript from its nec­es­sary role in the front-​end. NJSB” doesn’t exact­ly roll off the tongue, either, and still has the same ambi­gu­i­ty prob­lem as LAMP.”

How about pithy sort-​of-​acronyms pat­terned like database-​frontend-​backend? Here are some Perl examples:

  • MRDancer: MySQL, React, and Dancer (I use this at work. Yes, the M could also stand for MongoDB. Naming things is hard.)
  • MRMojo: MongoDB, React, and Mojolicious
  • PACat: PostgreSQL, Angular, and Catalyst
  • etc.

Ultimately it comes down to com­mu­ni­ty and indus­try adop­tion. If you’re involved with back-​end web devel­op­ment, please let me know in the com­ments if you agree or dis­agree that LAMP” is still a use­ful term, and if not, what should replace it.