I'd like to have a little article about Moose for haters.  Why?  Well, because Perl people are prolific people.  They talk a lot, and it's good stuff.  But haters don't want to listen to that.  Here goes.  It's not perfect, and not even accurate.  It's accurate enough, but this is for the haters.  If you're a perl hacker, go read gphat's slides.

What is Moose?  Moose is a syntactically different object system.  What that means in real term is simple; It makes Perl better, by basically making all those snide remarks people make completely irrelevant.

First off, It's not just syntactic sugar.  That's what is immediately apparent, but there is a lot more to Moose- and if you are using Moose for the syntactic sugar, just drop Perl altogether and go back to PHP.   We (or the Python camp) will see you in a few years when you mature as a developer.

The syntactic sugar Moose offers is great, and shouldn't be discounted as it makes Perl less ugly and more readable¹.  Moose's real power is evident when you just sit down and work with it a bit, build a program or two and discover the  API into class definitions (going meta).

Just take a minute and think about this.  You can define and manipulate information about the definitions of your class.  The meta-object.  Total crackpottery, right?.  Huge applications are built in C++ and Java, and they don't have a meta-object protocol.  That just means they're inferior.  People talk about Lisp, and how you can do a lot with very little code.  The problem is that all Lisp developers are just a little short of insane.  Perl developers aren't insane, they just can't market themselves or their products.  Moose brings in the aspects of Lisp that make it so damned easy to be amazingly productive, without requiring you to be crazy to use it.

This API into the meta-stuff is what makes Moose classes so easy, and easy to understand.  You don't have to learn Lisp to get it.  I don't know Lisp, and I use Moose extensively.  I also am not a CS guru, and can use git extensively.

If you don't know what Roles are, or have at least been briefed on the discussions about Roles and Inheritance, you probably need to read up on that just to get an idea of what's being talked about.  Otherwise, you have two choices.

The first choice is to start using Moose, listen to all the really smart people, and love it and constantly say, "Wow, my code just works and works well."

Or, continue to ignore Moose, and write bad code in whatever language you use.

However much hype Ruby and Rails get, it's because of one thing and one thing alone - Marketing.  It amuses me to no end to hear about how developers hate marketing, then jump on whatever fanboy bandwagon creaks past them. 

As for all those who call Perl "line noise", it's obvious they don't know Perl and are just repeating something that originated in marketing.

And yeah, I'm a hater, too.  At least I know it.

[1]

I don't actually think Perl is ugly or unreadable.  That's probably because my code doesn't suck.

Those who know me know that I'm a big fan of (fútbol|football|soccer).  It's really the only sport I follow, in spite of my passion for cars.  I don't, however, have a lot of free time to schedule to watch matches, so when I saw FoxSoccer.TV I was immediately intrigued and whipped out my credit card.  I wasn't blown away, but I certainly wasn't disappointed.  On demand matches, as I had time to watch.  For all but the most important matches, this was ideal.  On the important matches, I have to just catch a cold.

The most popular league is the English Premier League, and that's what FoxSoccer covers the most thoroughly.  It starts on August 16th, but there are lead-in friendlies and other matches, most notably the FA Community Shield.

This year (like so many previous years), it was between Manchester United and Chelsea and also bound to be a good game to watch.  I was, unfortunately, only able to catch the first half of it live.  That's ok, because I have FoxSoccer.TV!  I can watch it on demand!

Except, now, just click over to FoxSoccer.TV, and you get this:


So, they're rolling out a new version of their site.  That's good.

They've disconnected my access, so I can't watch the second half of the Community Shield.  That's bad.

They have no blog, or anything else to follow for updates.  I don't really care about updates, but I do want to know why it takes 4 days to launch a new website.

That is a really terrible expectation to set.  I can only hope that come August 15th, 2009, the transition experience makes it worth the time.  I'm not hopeful, and I'm thinking that it's entirely possible that on August 16th, the first day of Premiership games is going to go by with a lot of miscellaneous bugs.

And also, beach soccer!?  That is really the best thing that you can show?  You could show the segment of Ballack's elbow into Nani and the subsequent goal.  The quality is terrible, the game is silly.  Come on Fox, get with the program.

Setup a blog.  Don't take 4 days to release a new system and cut out viewers from a great game.