Otto - Please subscribe to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' if you want in on this discussion; everyone isn't going to copy you, and refusal to subscribe isn't indicative of your interest in helping. See http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=advocacy . > I'm choosing a new language only if is suitable for most of my tasks and > these range from the 10 line script up to several million line project. > Currently Perl is rather capable for any small scripting task but it's > out of questions if there are more than 2 person involved or the line > count goes above several hundreds (maybe thousands). And this is only It depends on what you consider small and large projects. I would argue that no language is going to fill all of your project needs, but Perl certainly fits the bill if you need both fast coding and scalability. I'm involved in a project at Verio currently, building a large XML-driven branding system. 7 developers are writing more or less concurrently, using CVS for revisioning, about 200K lines of code so far, with some basic enforced rules, including a OO class designation list, fully-documented methods, and coding practices. It has been an enormous success; fast, modular, scalalable, blah blah blah. > As the facts stands Perl5 is not well suited for medium to large > programming tasks. But as much as I understand Larry Wall Perl6 might > get into the position of a capable candidate. If it will be, only > history will tell us. Again, this is mostly dependent on programming practices. What types of tasks are you referring to? > IMHO Perl lacks readability and IMHO not enough is done during the RFC > process. If you really like Perl don't questions this personal opinion, > better look for solution in enhancing readability without compromising > usability so I might change my mind later on. It's not easy to find the > hot spots neither easy to fix them. How about going through the perl > mailing lists and look for all the silly novice questions? Your argument has been that Perl, being modelled after English, lacks readability. First of all, Perl isn't tightly coupled with English syntactically, other than the fact that the analogous verb usually comes first in a command form. Second of all, as I mentioned before, "readability" in your estimate is a product of statically-consistent syntaxes, which Perl doesn't have, and probably will never have. Next, if you have suggestions as to making Perl less like the English with which you find readability problems, suggest them. > IMHO Perl lacks modularity or better said a construct similar to a > standard library. Besides the missing standard library in Pascal was the > reason why Pascal didn't succeed. So it might be necessary to have a > separate RFC process on which modules where included an with which > interface. Maybe there isn't just one library. One of the keys to Perl's success has been its modularity, and the enormous library of CPAN. I'm not sure what you're referring to, unless you mean the lack of default-enforced namespaces. > IMHO Perl does not lack usability but usability is so important, it > always has to be kept in mind. I fail to understand your differentiation between readability and usability. If it isn't readable, it isn't usable. Unless you just mean the functional breadth of the language.
