Why I used Perl for this Web site
I have an affection for Perl. It's a funky programming language, developed by a sort-of linguist back in 1987. Like so many of the most useful programming languages, it was born in the UNIX world to solve the real, everyday needs of its creator. It has survived as one of the most popular and endearing of programming languages.Perl has served a variety of uses -- genome sequencing, for instance; also its original task of making UNIX administration easier; and in the 1990s, web programming. Perl was the first powerful, high-level, dynamic programming language that became popular for scripting web sites -- before PHP, ASP, or even Java.
And it still endures there. There are other options now, some better suited to web development in general. The one I use almost exclusively now is Ruby. Its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, borrowed a lot of concepts -- and, I'd say, a certain flavor -- from Perl. Ruby is very sophisticated and interesting. But it's more modern than Perl; it's cleaner, it's simpler, yet it feels just as powerful. For most of the commercial web sites I develop now, I use Ruby.
But there are exceptions. For simpler sites -- like, say, this one -- I prefer Perl. Specifically, I prefer a framework written in Perl called HTML::Mason.
The things I like about Mason are its speed, and the way it doesn't get in my way when I'm building simple sites. Mason gives me exactly what I want when I'm developing a site from the ground up. In that way, it's kind of like raw PHP, but more thoughtfully put together.
Mason just fits my brain. It feels almost artistic, almost literary. Maybe it's because its chief maintainer is a music major who went to Bard College, a rather well-reputed arts college situated in the Catskill Mountains where I grew up. Maybe it's because Mason was originally designed for publishing companies. Whatever the cause, Mason has an organic, writerly feel to me that no other web development framework I've met has.
And that's the right kind of feel for a site like this: a personal, unpressured piece of work that's meant to be casually shared and savored, like a book.