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Where's the "IronPerl" Project?
pondlife writes "A friend asked me today about using some Microsoft server components from Perl. Over the years he's built up a large collection of Perl/COM code using Win32::OLE and he had planned on doing the same thing here. The big problem is that as with many current MS APIs, they're available for .NET only because COM is effectively deprecated at this point. I did some Googling, expecting to find quickly the Perl equivalent of IronPython or IronRuby. But to my surprise I found almost nothing. ActiveState has PerlNET, but there's almost no information about it, and the mailing list 'activity' suggests it's dead or dying anyway. So, what are Perl/Windows shops doing now that more and more Microsoft components are .NET? Are people moving to other languages for Windows administration? Are they writing wrappers using COM interop? Or have I completely missed something out there that solves this problem?"
Unfortunately, (as perl fan), Perl6 is the problem. All the bright young things went into the death march that is Perl6 and CPAN stopped getting useful additions. Two burnout cycles later, we still don't have Perl6. Or modern, complete XML/Xpath support. Or a DBI::CSV which can do joins. Or any other number of actually useful code bits.
I'm now tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Python.
My linux box doesn't have ruby or python installed, and I haven't had any problems. Try deleting perl from yours!
What distribution are you running? Every distribution I've used had Python installed by default for years (and would break terribly if you tried to remove it).