Comments for Jason Porritt

Comment on Understanding Object-Oriented Perl by Deva

Deva — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:46:49 +0000

Good material to start with. Thanks a lot.

Comment on Perl Survey Results: US Perl Mongers by Jason

Jason — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:45:33 +0000

@Kirrily: True, but that spike at 10 years of experience is the percentage of people who participate in Perl Mongers, not the number of people. That is, over 80% of the people who indicated 10 years of experience have participated in the past year, compared to only about 40% for both 9 and 11 years.

@KD: Hmm, that is interesting. Thanks for sharing your observation.

Comment on Perl Survey Results: US Perl Mongers by kd

kd — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:09:09 +0000

Hmm, there’s an interesting apparent function on the perl mongers participation by age group chart. Essentially the closer to the central (mean|median|mode) age, the more likely is closer community involvement.

Thanks for this by the way

Comment on Perl Survey Results: US Perl Mongers by Kirrily Robert

Kirrily Robert — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:56:27 +0000

You see spikes at multiples of 10 years (and to a lesser extent, multiples of 5) for both “years programming” questions. I think people are just rounding their numbers.

Comment on A Perl Monger’s take on Ruby: Conclusion by Jason

Jason — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:47:08 +0000

Mod_perl is not a good fit for every web application, as you mentioned, and does require more memory and configuration than several alternatives. What it does do is give complete control over each phase of Apache, which I have found is extremely valuable in complex systems of applications. FastCGI just can’t do the sort of things I’ve been involved with using mod_perl.

I recently started using a bit of PHP to simplify maintenance on a small site, mainly because it is so easy to deploy in a shared hosting environment. So far it has been working well. FastCGI might be an option but I haven’t spent much time with it, either.

Comment on A Perl Monger’s take on Ruby: Conclusion by Mark Stosberg

Mark Stosberg — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:11:45 +0000

Thanks for the perl vs. ruby posts. I enjoyed them.

regarding mod_perl, I’m frustrating about the difficulty to deploy it. It is a rare site to find in a mass-hosting environment, can use a fair bit of persistent memory, and generally requires configuration that can’t be automated.

Maybe FastCGI is a middle ground. I haven’t explored it much. PHP seems to have found a decent balance of good performance without the extra configuration or hosting issues with mod_perl.

While I am also sticking with Perl over ruby, and also appreciate and use mod_perl as a tool, I suspect there are easier ways to build high-performance websites than with mod_perl.

Comment on Buzz Watch: Perl vs. Ruby by jason

jason — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:13:05 +0000

Thanks for the comments, Kirrily. I changed the keywords to include “programming” as you suggested and that is a lot better. It’s still hard to judge whether or not that’s an accurate count but at least it appears closer.

Comment on Buzz Watch: Perl vs. Ruby by Kirrily Robert

Kirrily Robert — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:23:01 +0000

Huh, great stuff, Jason.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Perl people don’t tend to use “perl” as a tag in their blog posts. I know that Perl Buzz doesn’t, typically, because all our posts are about Perl and it’s not a useful distinction for us… but perhaps we should anyway? Over on use.perl.org the platform doesn’t support tags at all. Between the two of those, that could count for 50-100 posts a day, I suspect.

Another thing, just looking at the ruby posts, is that many of them aren’t about the programming language at all. From the first page, as I look at it right now, I see: “this is a blog with a Ruby Gloom layout”, “diamond and ruby studded shoes”, “meet the great ruby dog”, “due splendide cavalier ruby”, “Rolling Stones ‘Ruby Tuesday’”, “Ruby and I did our last weeks ironing”, “amichette cavalier ruby”, “to find that Ruby had tipped over”, something in Spanish about the Smashing Pumpkins, a gemstone spam blog, http://community.webshots.com/user/RubyAmelia , and “ruby, sapphire and diamond encrusted Rene Caovilla sandal”.

In fact, on the front page only 4 posts were about the programming language, 2 were in Asian languages I can’t even start to read and might have been about the language, and 14 weren’t about programming at all.

Compare the Perl list: at least 13/20 were actually about Perl (in fact some were duplicates with the Ruby list, where people said things like “Perl, Python, and Ruby”).

If you change the search to be “perl programming” and “ruby programming” you’ll see that we’re running more or less neck-and-neck since August 11th, when is when Schwern triggered the perl blogging push and I really started running with it.