On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 12:32:32AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote > Is it like perl? Support every possible way to do something if it > remotely makes sense to do it, no matter how bizarre the syntax?
The (d)evolution of perl reminds me of what's happened to Firefox, GNOME, and KDE. To paraphrase the emacs joke, perl is a mediocre operating system that lacks a lightweight text-manipulation utility. WTF does every simple program try to become an OS? * The original "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" PERL has become a pseudo-OS. Believe it or not, it was a lightweight practical text-parsing and report-generating utility back in the day. * Netscape (under AOL) aimed at becoming a pseudo-OS on top of Windows. We know how that turned out. * I'm old enough to remember the days of the "Phoenix" betas (later Firebird then Firefox). A lean/mean fast web-browser. Now it's turned into a bloated monstrosity, complete with relational database, that's being used as the basis for Firefox-OS phones. * Google's Chrome/Chromium came from Chrome-OS, so it's not too surprising that it demands dbus and udev to build. * I remember when KDE and GNOME were zippy on machines with 64 megs of RAM. The sad part is that the GNOME desktop had more features then than it has now as it moves towards becoming GNOME-OS. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
