On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:10:47 +0100 Johan Vromans <jvrom...@squirrel.nl> wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/29/0235220/perls-glory-days-are-behind-it-but-it-isnt-going-anywhere > > We know we suck at marketing, but is there anything we are going to do > about it? > To quote Larry Wall from http://www.perl.com/pub/1997/wall/keynote.html : <<<<< I have a book on my bookshelf that I've never read, but that has a great title. It says, "All Truth is God's Truth." And I believe that. The most viable belief systems are those that can reach out and incorporate new ideas, new memes, new metaphors, new interfaces, new extensions, new ways of doing things. My goal this year is to try to get Perl to reach out and cooperate with Java. I know it may be difficult for some of you to swallow, but Java is not the enemy. Nor is Lisp, or Python, or Tcl. That is not to say that these languages don't have good and bad points. I am not a cultural relativist. Nor am I a linguistic relativist. In case you hadn't noticed. :-) >>>>> Throughout history, various religions, cultures, human languages, works of art, and other idea systems, were mixed-and-matched cross-pollinated one another, were forked and splinterred, and brought new memes into everywhere. An idea system that did not incorporate ideas from elsewhere quickly became stagnated and inbred, and were then largely forgotten. Furthermore, some idea systems “died”. Few people nowadays are pure Stoicists (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism ) and even the most devote Jews don't take the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentateuch_%28disambiguation%29 to its letter, and no one nowadays wants to program in Fortran I, COBOL or ALGOL (and yes, programming languages are, aside from their utility, idea systems). But the idea systems behind these languages live on. The Perl idea system has proven incredibly influential on most programming languages that came after it, so it has won. Maybe most people no longer find it adequate to use Perl 5, or think that some more in vogue languages are better, but the Perl influence lives on. I'm not a Perl tribalist, in the sense that if my customer prefers something else, then I use it, and try to make the best of the situation, even though I'm not 100% happy, which like I note in http://shlomifish.livejournal.com/1747.html is something that Cognitive Therapy now recommends to do based on Stoicism. And I've started to write some projects in Ruby. People have been crying that Perl is dead, but it is very much alive, just as most people in the United States and in Great Britain have not heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great or of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin , but their incredible legacy still lives on, and many people carry the “memes” that they originate or establish in their mind and hearts. So what should we do: 1. Continue to improve perl, Perl and CPAN. We cannot have perl 5 stagnate, and the Perl 6 implementations are still incomplete and tend to be under-performing. 2. Don't worry about people using Perl instead of something else that still carries its legacy, or different legacies. 3. Continue to import new ideas from other places. 4. Continue our tendency to say that “There's more than one way to do it” implies that some of these ways are using other programming languages, and that some languages got some things right more than Perl 5 or even Perl 6, or just differently - http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/57811.html . 5. Tell people that newer is not necessarily better. 6. Don't worry about battling Perl against statistical accusations of stagnations like TIOBE , GitHub statistics, Google trends, etc. , because these things are silly “My schwartz is bigger than yours” which the uninformed masses may fall for, but intelligent and wise people, who are the true movers and doers, don’t. 7. Finally, the language called “Perl 5” that we will use 20 years from now will be very different than the perl-5.000, but it will be more modern, more adapted to the times and hopefully better. And I'm almost sure that Perl’s legacy will live on and Perl will be remembered, even if no one uses something called “Perl”. ----------------------------------- I hope I made myself clear. Furthermore, a lot of recent trends can be dismissed as silly, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat -s, but lolcats have such a low barrier for entry (almost everyone can take a photo of a cat, or whatever and caption it using Inkscape or whatever), and a lot of lolcats are funny or amusing (yet often insightful). It is a whole new idea system and a very subversive at that, so much that both China and Iran blocked the Cheezburger network in their firewall, because they are afraid of it weakening their political power-structures and dogma (and as silly as it may seem, they are right about that). The important thing to note is that one should “embrace change”. See: http://www.robcottingham.ca/cartoon/archive/this-brain-this-brain-fire/ Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does "Zionism" mean? - http://shlom.in/def-zionism When Chuck Norris uses git, he takes a coffee break after initiating every git commit. And then he waits for the commit to finish. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
