++ on this.

In the, about, last six months or so I heard "Perl has too many choices" from many sides. And I say "No, damnit!" Primarily, I don't care about language popularity. I care about the job that has to be done, and which I'm using a language for. If popularity would influence this positively, I'd care for sure. But I just can't see any advantage over what Perl already has. It is mature, has a large and experienced userbase. And it has a code library behind it with solutions to over a decade of problems people encountered.

I know, and experience every day, the FUD that's spread around Perl in the world. That it's slow, old, ugly, write-only, and all the other stuff that is told by people who most of the time never worked with Perl beyond a CGI script that was written badly in the first place. And a big bunch of those people seem to only be able to argue through mockings and invalid claims.

To be honest, I don't think you could even convince those people even to evaluate what they are saying. It's not what they want. They don't want to know how good or bad Perl is, they just want to state that "at least their script doesn't look as ugly as PERL".

Concerning the beginners and the choices: As someone absolutely correct stated above, beginners *will* be confused. The outscream that Perl has too many choices says, in my opinion, more about the complainer than about Perl. There he has five to ten modules in the same problem-area, which give him different solutions. Even if there were only one module, that doesn't say it's the right thing for the job, or that it couldn't be done "better." After all, there must be reasons people start new modules in already cpan-covered problem-spaces.

Nailing down your problems, the frames of your project, the goals, the risks, the priorities and finding the best fitting solution, in short- and long-term is nothing anyone else can do for you. It's a fundamental part of software development. In my opinion, stuff like CRUD is partly used by the wrong people. It should be a shortcut on your way, a way you know, a way you have planned. It should not be a try to hide the programming part of programming. In my opinion, CRUD should only be used by people who know what they're doing.

So rather than ranting "Awwww, there's more than one module for my job! Now I actually have to look at them, read documentations and stuff!", people should start being glad that they have this. CPAN is more than a library for code, it's a library of experiences. Good ones and bad ones, but nonetheless, it's there for everyone who seeks it.

Ok, this got a bit longer. Just regard it as a very long and loud scream into a pillow :)

Update: Corrected some typos