My friend and past co-worker Andrew Anker has taken a role at Six Apart as EVP, Corp. Dev. This means a lot to me, not only am I a big fan of both AA and SA, I take it as a sign that SA is getting serious about building out their a platform to grow as this nascent industry grows, and that’s a good thing. There is tons of work to be done on both the revenue and product side of blogging, and it’s heartening to to know the team at Six Apart will be on the case.
Andrew Anker Joins Six Apart
My friend and past co-worker Andrew Anker has taken a role at Six Apart as EVP, Corp. Dev. This means a lot to me, not only am I a big fan of both AA and SA, I take it as a sign that SA is getting serious about building out…
I can’t help but think that the use of Perl will hinder Six Apart’s progress. Granted it’s apparently up for the job so far, it’s hard to think that will continue. It’s definitely the one reason I would never consider Moveable Type.
Yet Perl is the reason we use MT in the classroom because it offers a step behind the operating side of dynamic pages for freshmen web developers.
Perl as opposed to what? And what’s the hinderance?
MT’s approach is to “bake pages” (publish static pages) from their Perl-based system. This means that they can build on Perl indefinitely, since only blog owners are running code — visitors are viewing static html pages with minimal server costs. Their system scales much better for larger sites than a PHP approach where every visitor is calling dynamic pages.
Perl is also superior to PHP (what most other systems use) for adding new complex features using other system apps (i.e., cronjobs, procmail, etc.). Toss in mod_perl and you’re gonna have a great system.
You may not like the licensing costs (i don’t), but MT is still a great blogging system.
i love perl (programmed in it for over 5 years now, check out the E-xact Perl SDK that I wrote version 6 and 7 of which is available at developer.e-xact.com) but it’s a dog’s breakfast of traps waiting to kill you!
And I love MT (my blog at http://www.rolandtanglao.com, which is down due to domain transfer problems due to my procrastination 🙂 , uses MT)
But, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that no other popular blogging systems use it: WordPress, Drupal, Blogware, etc. all use PHP or other easier to program languages
In the long run, the use of Perl, in my humble opinion, will be a net minus for MT.
Perl… is a good and very widely used cgi language. Opinions on this stuff vary depending on which programming religions you’ve sworn oaths to, but the rub, I’d say, is that Perl is a bit of a bear as one’s application gets more complex. The more code, the more spaghetti you have. And it can be hard for someone other than the original coder to read and follow (TMTOWTDI).
PHP is (IMOO) not a real winner for application programming either, but great for web programming.
These programming language considerations do nothing to diminish what has been coded, works well, and is known and loved. OTOH, if the MT future was building something bigger and more complex in this vein, if that’s where the business opportunity lay, it’s be a shame the code base wasn’t in Python, or at least in Java or C++.
Not that it really matters – blog on!