Is it Perl or is it Just Me?

A lesson that I've learned after installing many content management systems is that me and Perl (a programming language) don't get along well. I've found that web applications written in Perl have two characteristics

1. They're usually the most powerful and full-featured and
2. They're the hardest to install and keep running right.

Examples:

Twiki - If you're looking for a Wiki that does it all and does it extremely well, look no further than Twiki, billed as "an Enterprise Collaboration Platform" it lives up to its title. Installing it however took me 2-4 hours a day for a solid week. I kept thinking it was good to go, then I'd start using it and yet another problem would show up. It was a seemingly endless cycle of tinkering, asking questions and trying anything I could think of. Apparently there are people who can get it up and running solidly since Yahoo!, Cingular, Disney and Motorola have all found uses for it.

WebGUI - I mentioned WebGUI recently, so I won't go on too much about it, but it's powerful. Templating in WebGUI is phenomenal, asset management and user managment are as well. Installing and upgrading it are surprisingly difficult. WebGUI taught me to hate CPAN (an archive of Perl code libraries)--they rarely seemed to install correctly and I don't know enough about Perl to intuitively know why. I've spent dozens of hours reading documentation and compiling Perl libraries trying to get WebGUI going correctly. In the end, it was worth it but really... there has to be a better way.

MovableType - I actually can't complain too much about the popular blog software MovableType, but it is much more difficult to install than WordPress in my experience. Once it's up and running it's excellent.

Interchange - Interchange is "an open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and application server/component applications"--basically an ecommerce platform. I installed it once on RedHat 9 and it took all day one day and part of another. Once it's up, it's solid and powerful but good luck getting it running.

Maybe you're thinking--"you just don't know Perl or Linux." Maybe you're right, I have no idea, but I do know that I can get pretty much any PHP or Ruby application installed in under an hour. But even after a couple years of experience, Perl still seems to require at least a couple days of my time pecking away in the "black box" of the terminal before any magic happens.