Fun with Perl, 2009: ikiwiki

Thanks Don.

The funny part of that story to me is that shortly after I started ikiwiki,
I got several negative comments from people about having chosen perl. These
petered out after a week or two, and I don't hear that at all anymore. I do
hear occasionally of people who had to learn or refresh their perl-fu in
order to write a plugin (although ikiwiki also lets you do that in eg,
python).

And the development community around it is not huge, but big enough to be
healthy. (More than 30 contributors, more than 100 plugins; more incoming
code than I often have time to review on my own.)

I guess I probably turned off a few potential contributors / users right at
the beginning by using perl, but once it got up to the plausible promise
stage, people seemed to be more interested in what it could do, and how,
than implementation details.

If you are looking for something like this not in perl, you could try GitIt (http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/) which has at least a few of the
same ideas as ikiwiki (use of git, markdown) but is notably not a static
site compiler. It seems to have a smaller development community (6
committers, 9 plugins), though I hesitate to say that's because it's
written in a less popular (but currently possibly more trendy language) --
haskell, or maybe because it's younger.

I've written enough perl not to be a fan of it for anything large, and this
is likely my last big perl project. I would personally now prefer ikiwiki
were written in haskell, but only if people were still able to contribute
to it. I doubt that writing it in ruby or python would have increased the
contributor pool greatly, and I see no other advantages to using those
languages.

(Well, except for their lack of a few horrid perl warts such as `func($_)
foreach @list` being able to mutate the contents of the list if the
function modifies its input value.)

BTW, did you know that someone is writing an apt-get clone in perl?

Have been looking much at ikiwiki. But my perl angst has kept me from trying it. Also looked at Gitit (haskell), but am now waiting for/will help with uWiki (lua) when it gets usable enough.

I find it amusing that all of the Git-backed wikis use strange languages.