What's the strange bad-mouthing of Red Hat in this article? Upstream Perl comes with dozens of modules in the base tarball, and the packaging just splits that into separate RPMs so you can have more minimal installs. If you really want to install all the modules from the upstream tarball, you install <i>perl-core</i> which is a meta-package that pulls in everything. You can install CGI.pm either by:<p><pre><code> yum install 'perl(CGI)'
</code></pre>
or by:<p><pre><code> yum install perl-core
</code></pre>
and this works on Fedora and RHEL (I just checked).<p>The article claims it's <i>not really what you would recognise as Perl</i> and Red Hat <i>[strips] out many parts of Perl that they consider non-essential</i> both of which are plainly untrue.
TFA bad-mouths CGI, so let me ask: The only server-side technologies widely available on shared-hosting providers seem to be CGI and mod_php. What else are people supposed to use? Are you simply not worthy anymore unless you're willing to spring for a VPS?
"At some point Perl 5.22 or one of its successors will make it into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And at that point we have a problem."<p>This made me laugh this morning, version 5.22 will probably be included in the 8.0 release? So we have a few years to go. RedHat 6.* is still running Perl 5.10 so no worries about anything breaking in the next 5> years.<p>Edit: formatting
As long as CGI is still available from CPAN, I don't really mind.<p>But I still think CGI scripts have their place, and I have written a bunch over the last two years at our company. I get that CGI has a number of problems, but for simple tasks I think it's a completely acceptable solution.<p>(Just to be clear, I am talking of CGI as in "web server calling an external program through a defined interface", not the HTML-generating stuff in Perl's CGI module - my scripts use Template::Toolkit for generating HTML.)
> There are good technical reasons for this. CGI is a dying technology. In 2015, there are far better ways to write web applications in Perl. We don’t want to be seen to encourage the use of a technology which no-one should be using.<p>I don't see the harm in including it. I would think it was enough to document the disadvantages.
I suppose you might want to use CGI.pm for some low level stuff but I find I can still get most of what I need by copy and pasting stuff from Matt's CGI scripts (<a href="http://www.scriptarchive.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scriptarchive.com/</a>).
Is there anything I can't do in Swift? Perl is super cool, but Swift seems like it can now be used on most of your text parsing and big data crunching needs (DNA, lab R&D, etc) now.<p>And it was everyone's first web language in the day. I was super impressed when ran my first perl script. I was hooked. :-)