Yep. Been there, done that. If Perl is not installed, I don't use that host, regardless of pricing or features. You can still find them, just not as sexy as the "newer" stuff.

Old school is not going away, but you can't find it everywhere, and that's a sad thing.

What I'm discovering (the hard way), is hosts can offer Perl, and it's there, but it's just super basic stuff. And once there, I find out things just don't run because there are things missing, including needed configurations. What makes things worse is they don't understand what's wrong, even if there is a 500 error.

I also thought I could find the right web servers, but it's not like they offer a tryout, or a test driver, its just "comes with Perl", and once there it's too late to step back. My current hosting provider was kind enough to fix things for me after reaching out, allowing guidance and talking to some people, but at first they were all clueless. The other host provider I hired is absolutely lost and now radio silence about my refund, it's still "waiting to be processed".

Forgot an important detail: when building this CMS I went with PERL after considering... if there was anything that will stay as part of webservers, was "Perl". Transparent migrations and upgrades lasted for about 10 years, good, but I was aiming for more.

I realize it might have been your first step when you ran into this problem, but have you checked at The Perl Foundation [perlfoundation.org] to see about if any recent changes are announced there?

Thanks not2easy, I didn't check there. I will check the info.

At this moment I'm organizing ideas to rewrite my CMS on PHP. Events in the recent years got me a bit shocked, because basically (and confirmed by info I found on the web), new Cpanels come with some changes, and despite the websites reporting to the browser 500 internal server error, the techs (me included) couldn't find the error report on the server as there were some configurations preventing this to show up, this sucks. Once they allowed me to prove my point, they found how to enable this and see the errors themselves, but other stuff was discovered that they were not familiar with.

The problem I see is, while Perl is still working and I do talk Perl, things get lost in translation when people do not talk Perl. I don't need them to understand the language or the scripts, but they don't seem informed well enough at server level on how to properly set things up. I had enough issues with Perl modules in the recent past because according to them "everything was fine", but once tried to install some pending modules, the system reported errors, and compiler errors. In a way, this is like a full new Windows installation that seems ok until people try to use the notepad and find out there is conflict with some DLLS. They never new about this because nothing in the server used such standard things that used to come out of the box. And it seems new Cpanel combos don't come configured the same way.

One of several weird errors... was the system reporting one file "init.pl" didn't exist, but it did, along with other files at the same location. But regardless of file permissions and ownership being ok, that was the only file reported as "not found". It's a tiny file with only 49 lines, and removing comments: it's only 17 lines, nothing fancy, not even using modules, very simple stuff. This made no sense at all.

I believe this will get worse over time.

Problem is, not every week I have enough time to deal with such problems, or to "guide" the techs, specially when fewer companies have chats or phones, instead it's via tickets and this takes even more time. It's funny, due to the current date, I'm about to charge a client for a renewal, and suddenly the sites were all broken, and moving to a new server resulted in the same situation.

Like it or not, I have to go back to the drawing board.

I think many host focus less on Perl because many developers simply don't use it. With PHP pretty much anyone can learn how to code using it, the problem there is that PHP lets you write very bad code that still works. Perl is still an important server side scripting language and hosts should continue to support it fully.

Mack.

@mack: true.

The way I see it, it's a problem with "out of the box". It's like "hey so you support ASP?" -yes- (yes because it's installed, but nobody uses it, so... I guess it will work because it says on the box!). Then you install your websites and it doesn't work, and then people discover there is something wrong with the setup, the modules, the configuration, Cpanel, etc. I often take a look at the Cpanel forums, it's quite revealing! so I guess techs should check those forums more often.

Things people don't use, statistically, are more open to issues when you try them, and it's only then when people realize there is something wrong.

7 months late to the discussion, but... yeah. Perl was the very first language I learned (even before HTML!), so it has a special place in my heart. But over time it's gotten harder and harder to keep everything maintained, so I find myself using it less and less.

I rebelled, too, but at some point you have to realize that unless you own stock in Perl (haha), you're wasting your time.

I honestly worry that coding in general is a dying art form. I don't do commercial web design anymore because I can't compete with the guy offering Wordpress templates for $200! And just look at WebmasterWorld and other coding forums; we used to see 100+ posts a day, now this thread is the top one in the Perl forum with no replies in 7 months :'-(

We're fighting the good fight, but I don't think we're going to win.

Been there... but not with perl. My fixed-width website needed a complete redesign for years and i put it off, put it off, put it off, before i finally decided to give it a go. New CSS, new HTML, new everything. I stopped writing content for a month while i did it.

once you finally take the plunge its not so bad, and its actually quite nice to have a new project instead of writing the same old content every day.

And theres no way id want to go back to my old design now.

Just saying... maybe spending a month or two overhauling your site's code, and putting everything else on hold, isnt such a bad option

Even with the new stuff, which I moved to some years back, I still use PERL for things that PERL does so well, so efficiently, and so concisely. Then again, I don't PHP or anything else (including JS) so PERL is still my "toolbox".

YMMV

This sounds like a good reason to move from shared hosting to running your own server. Better value for money, more flexible, you control updates.

And just look at WebmasterWorld and other coding forums; we used to see 100+ posts a day, now this thread is the top one in the Perl forum with no replies in 7 months :'-(

Perl is less popular than it used to be and so is this forum.

Just know that if you move to a host with Cpanel, there is a good chance Perl will be supported longer because the majority of Cpanel is in Perl.

I was thinking about this thread last night and realized something.

I've been coding for darn nigh 30 years. I taught myself how to code by looking at Perl scripts you could download for free. I used Netscape Navigator to create the HTML pages, then coded in Perl for the backend stuff. Eventually I taught myself HTML, then JavaScript, then PHP, then MySQL, and it just kept going from there.

I'm far from a great coder, nowhere near the league of most of the other regulars on here! But I've still been able to make a living from coding my entire adult life, so I'm proud of that.

But here's what I realized:

I have never in my life, never, met another coder in person. I've lived in 3 states and visited maybe 20 countries, and never once have I met someone that said they code for a living.

I did teach Advanced Programming at the local community college for a few years, so I guess technically you could say that I met coders that were my students. But in reality, I was the last class they had before graduating and most of them didn't even understand what a variable was! I blew their minds with basic concepts like arrays, loops, and functions, they'd never seen such a thing :-O And to my knowledge, none of those students ever worked in any programming fields.

I watch shows and movies that make you feel like you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a coder, but that just has not been my experience. Maybe if I lived in Silicon Valley it would be different? But that's a very tiny corner of the world, and doesn't appear to be representative of the population.

It makes me realize just how rare we really are.

Servers, yeah, not exactly. The problem with servers is, your resources might be part of a virtual set, not something installed and normalized across the whole machine. Private? yes, but if possible I avoid the extra work. Clients can be picky, specially about prices and specs they don't understand, and I try to avoid jobs that would require me extra work if the client decides to move to a new server, yes... they should pay, but it's not always that easy, clients might need time to decide, but the web requires immediate action. Besides not everyone uses all the modules. I've been in situations where 10 out of 10 needed modules "are there", but when I try to use them I get errors, and then errors about the compiler during install, etc.

My websites still run on Perl, and they do so perfectly. But I'm already coding the new framework and then the CMS, this became unavoidable to me.

graeme_p: Perl is less popular than it used to be and so is this forum.

ouch, true. It saddens me a bit how today navigating forums you find almost daily "help me fix this WP plugin / how do I do this in WP / my WP site became slow suddenly", it's like today most people specialize on an specific tool, even if they can't achieve what they want, or achieving it takes A LOT of time. But I can also understand why less and less are willing to build complex apps.

csdude55: But here's what I realized:

I have never in my life, never, met another coder in person. I've lived in 3 states and visited maybe 20 countries, and never once have I met someone that said they code for a living.

I did teach Advanced Programming at the local community college for a few years, so I guess technically you could say that I met coders that were my students. But in reality [...]

I watch shows and movies that make you feel like you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a coder, but that just has not been my experience. Maybe if I lived in Silicon Valley it would be different? But that's a very tiny corner of the world, and doesn't appear to be representative of the population.

It makes me realize just how rare we really are.

So true. Around diff circles it's very easy to hear "I write code", but it's very rare (at least for me here, locally) to see proof of it. In the same way, you can post some code regarding a problem, and a bunch of people will have an opinion about your IF or SWITCH, just like people criticizing clothing, but it's not easy to cross paths with others who are doing what you do, or have done it in the past.

Despite not being my best decision I joined some local coding groups in FB, and yikes... most don't seem, don't sound, or can't prove they are coders, and some are just soooo weird! and would talk and talk about flutter and similar tools that take your life away. I've seen comments like "this is so easy in flutter" yeah, but can you do it? can you prove it? then why do you say it? and on the other hand I see more realistic comments from people who abandoned flutter because there are so many moving parts it's not even easy to fully install it and get it running, and so they move to something else.

SADLY, I'm seeing this being a common thing where I live, as you can find more and more students graduating with tons of certifications and fancy names, but they can't prove they know what the paper says. They have a lot of opinions, yes, but opinions don't build code. I have grown skeptic of people talking about degrees.

SADLY, I'm seeing this being a common thing where I live, as you can find more and more students graduating with tons of certifications and fancy names, but they can't prove they know what the paper says. They have a lot of opinions, yes, but opinions don't build code. I have grown skeptic of people talking about degrees.

I might have mentioned this before, but in that Advanced Programming class I had one girl that told me that she had never once gotten any program, in any language, to successfully run! And she was literally DAYS from graduating with a Programming degree!

My final exam was to write a specific program; something that I could do myself in less than an hour. It counted for 50% of the grade, and I was of the belief that if they couldn't write a relatively simple program then they shouldn't pass. I gave them a week to work on it, they could take it home, use books / notes / internet, work together, email me for advice, whatever they wanted: just make it work. Even if they couldn't get it work in the end, as long as they could show that they understood the general concept then they would pass.

But this girl didn't even know how to begin, and she seriously went to another instructor and offered to pay that instructor to write the program for her! I kid you not! I obviously had to fail her, and she ended up transferring to something like child care.

At that point, though, my final exam caught the attention of the director of the department, who decided that it was too hard. They felt that if the students had attended class and done the busy work then they should graduate :-O I refused to pass students that couldn't write a simple program, though, so that's when I parted ways with the college.

I have worked for a software company so I met lots of programmers there, obviously, and quite a lot of them good, some amazingly so. The main product was mission critical high performance financial software written in C++, and another big line was complex Oracle databases. I have worked with others, of varying quality on client projects.

I meet some programmers but rarely, and far fewer than work in other areas of IT. There are far more Windows sysadmins, and network people etc. than programmers.

At that point, though, my final exam caught the attention of the director of the department, who decided that it was too hard. They felt that if the students had attended class and done the busy work then they should graduate :-O I refused to pass students that couldn't write a simple program, though, so that's when I parted ways with the college.

Good you took a stand. There are far too many meaningless qualifications and certifications around.

I do not mind computer science students not being great day to day programmers because the emphasis there is the maths. When they are supposed to be doing software engineering or similar it is a disgrace. Shorter courses and "coding boot camps" are even worse.

Meanwhile, my kid had done very little programming at the start of school this fall (she has little interest in it). By the end of the first semester, she'd taught herself Python and written a complicated program that would read live video from a webcam of a person moving their arm. It was designed for people getting replacement limbs to gauge their range of motion. It had motion capture and gfx generating screen plotting of the results. It worked perfectly. I was blown away.

apparently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.