Is Perl dead?

As a young programmer working in the Systems Office at a large academic library in 1996, I discovered the wondrous utility of Perl for text processing and web programming. I hacked together a primitive service request program for users to report problems with desktops and dumb terminals from the old Geac GLIS 9000 System.

Lately it seems that Perl has fallen out of favor. Whether it's merely a generational thing or due to fundamental technical merits is a debatable question. The very question of whether Perl is in fact dead spurs lively discussion online. To wit, see the tersely worded site at isperldead.com. To see more, just google "is perl dead" to see some fun results.

There have been a number of languages to emerge in the last 10 years that one could use instead of Perl to get the job done. Ruby, PHP, and Python are the first to come to mind, but there are many others.

We still have a significant Perl codebase where I currently work, although we are moving more and more code over to Java. I'm just wondering what everyone else's experience is out there. I'd love to hear from you about this!

Local search

I just stumbled on EveryBlock last week when a friend emailed me a link to inform me that the Chinese food truck on the street where we work was closed down by the Licenses and Inspection Department. Coincidentally, I was browsing the New York Times website this week and was surprised to find a story there on EveryBlock.

EveryBlock aggregrates data from a number of sources, including government information such as health inspection data. It's a neat site--you can find out about home sales and police reports in your neighborhood as well as seeing if anyone has geotagged a photo from your block in flickr of late.

New article in code4lib

Issue 6 of code4lib is now live, and contains an article by none other than this blogger. code4lib's mission is to "foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future." The article I wrote fits nicely in with this mission statemtent; it's about using tree structures from GUI libraries to represent hierarchical data. Check it out at:

http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1083

Google Visualization API

The Google Visualization API allows you to display "structured" data using a variety of different visualizations.

An overview and documentation is available at: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/. You can view some samples at the Google Ajax APIs Playground. Some of the interesting examples include an annotated timeline and a motion chart (of the housing price index against the unemployment rate).

Data Rot on Sunday Morning

David Pogue did a piece about "data rot" on CBS's Sunday Morning this weekend. In case you are not familiar with the term, it means the process by which data formats and hardware become outmoded or physically deteriorate over time, thus rendering the data on them unrecoverable. One woman in the segment talks about how she can't watch her first movie for film school as there are no longer any machines to play it on -- even though school was not that long ago for her. Also, the CIO for the Library of Congress was interviewed about LOC's efforts to preserve historical and culturally significant information.

Check out the story at the CBS news website.

New York Times article about the "Deep Web"

An article in the New York Times today talks about the latest efforts to plumb the Deep/Invisible Web. Google's efforts in the area are discussed, as is an effort partially funded by Jeffrey Bezos (http://www.kosmix.com). A University of Utah effort is also mentioned (http://www.deeppeep.org).

You can view the article online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/internet/23search.html

Gmail Tasks and other things

On Monday, the Gmail blog weighed in on whether paper or the iPhone is the more productive tool. All of this as a humorous way to talk about GMail tasks, a new productivity tool available in Gmail (and also, be extension, on the iPhone).

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/tasks-paper-vs-iphone.html

In other news, there was an article in the New York Times the other day about digital archivists being in demand right now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/jobs/08starts.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink