Wednesday, October 22, 2008

It's Okay to Hate Perl

Today’s technical inanity is brought to you by Perl, CPAN, and RedHat Enterprise Linux. They’ll screw you over good!

I’m not a perl guru or a monk or whatever the hell the “smart” perl people refer to themselves as. All I know is that most of them seem to have beards and bad attitudes. Well, all I have is a bad attitude. I have no time for beards. I’ve also discovered that I have absolutely no patience for CPAN, when it doesn’t work. When doesn’t it work? When you have a broken Scalar::Util module pre-installed by RedHat. Thanks a ton, RedHat!

Why was I back in the land of perl? Haven’t I become a Rails fanboy? Well, I was trying to install Catalyst, a perl MVC framework. Why? I needed to know what the install would be like. Why? Because, that’s why. What are you, 5 years old or something? It turns out that even if you don’t have a broken perl dist, the Catalyst install sucks.

One of the frequent problems reported by new users of Catalyst is that it can be extremely time-consuming and difficult to install.

This is the stink of fail. I know the fail meme is getting beaten to death and is hardly a meme anymore due to mainstream adoption, but there it is. In capital letters. It’s screaming at you before you even try an install. “GO AWAY! This isn’t for you!” Is that message supposed to inspire confidence in the framework? If I do manage to install it, does that make me some mutant with superhuman abilities? Do I need to register with the federal government? I am allowed to be exported to Libya?

Not that I want to go to Libya…