Disclaimer: This is a bit of a rant. Not something I do often, but I feel this particular point is relevant and frustrating to a number of people besides myself.
I am getting tired of reading blatently wrong, un-researched, and yet boldly-declared information posted on the web. Not postings on puny personal blogs (like mine), those I can forgive. Instead, I’ve been seeing news items and statements on supposedly trustworthy sites that just don’t get the facts straight. This has been particularly and most recently true with the slew of press releases covering the release of Perl 5.10.
For example, take this article on LinuxDevices.com. Like several other press releases, they claim:
Just in time for Christmas, there’s a new version of perl, the first in over five years.
Perl 5.10 is not the first release in 5 years — it is the first feature release in that time. That is a big difference. There have been many stable releases since 5.8.0 that fixed bugs and improved Perl’s performance and stability, which paints an entirely different picture from what the article actually says. Their news item makes it sound as though Perl is an unsupported and inactive language, which is entirely untrue.
Also, the paragraphs comparing Perl to Python, Ruby, and PHP is laughable — and I’ve seen this exact text on several sites (eweek.com, for example). Yes, there are a lot more people using those languages today, and they are growing, but Perl still holds a formidable share of the dynamic language job market and that doesn’t appear to be changing rapidly. Don’t claim that Perl is a dying language unless you can show evidence.
Please check your facts before you post! It’s better to be correct than first.
(And FYI: Ruby is not a language “specially-made for use on the Web”.)