Oops, my typo, I mean very interesting points from everyone!!!
On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Tom Metro <[email protected]>wrote: > John Redford wrote: > > The future of Perl is more likely to be one of changeless stagnation, > > near-universal existence, popular usage for infrastructure, and limited > or > > no use for general purpose programming. And I am not sure why Perl users > > would be upset by that -- I don't see anyone upset that bash or grep > aren't > > being used more widely and replacing languages/tools that aren't all that > > much like them anyway. One might be content to see Perl do best that > which > > it does best, and not worry about the things it does not do. > > "...not sure why Perl users would be upset by that?" > > Because Perl spent a good number of years as a good quality, general > purpose programming language, developers got use to that, and now that's > going away. > > Because developers - likely to their detriment - become emotionally > invested in the tools they use, particularly ones that have been around > as long as Perl has. They want it to be viable, so they can continue > using it. > > This may not be rational, but its easy to see why it happens. > > > > The Little presentations are spot-on when they describe Perl as being > "glue" > > -- that was its origin and that is what it was one best at. Now it's > not. > > And it won't be again. > > > > Perl's popular origin was based on its operation as a tool that glued > > together the functionality (not the code) of existing tools like sed, > grep, > > find, sort, sh, and so forth. > > This is all true, and yet utterly irrelevant. If you look into the > historical origin of many languages you will find an initial purpose > that its current use has greatly diverged from. > > (Actually, for many of the tools you list, technically Perl didn't glue > them together, but rather subsumed them. Once I learned Perl, I > practically never used awk or sed again. But that's besides the point, > as Perl was indeed a consummate glue language.) > > > > Also, any time I hear Perl advocates talking about how dynamic typing is > > better than static typing, it just reminds me that Perl doesn't have type > > inference. > > Supposedly planned for Perl 6. (I'm guessing as a way to make the code > easier to run on the JVM.) > > What do you see as the advantage to type inference over dynamic typing? > The obvious one seems to be that it lets you emulate dynamic typing in a > statically typed language by doing all the dynamic typing determination > at compile time, and thus better efficiency. > > How often do you run across cases where the compiler infers incorrectly? > Doesn't it defeat the purpose of choosing a statically typed language? > > This feels much like an implementation detail. From the programmer's > perspective, they want dynamic typing, and the execution to be fast. > Whether that's implemented under the hood as run-time dynamic typing or > compile-time type inference should be irrelevant to the programmer, as > long as their performance objectives are met. > > > > Of course, the substantial problems of Perl are intractable. One cannot > fix > > them without changing Perl into a completely different language -- even > if > > one maintained backwards compatibility, there would be a serious > question of > > why one would bother to do so. > > > > ...there is not much you can take away from the language and still > > call it Perl. > > Now if only there was a language that was shiny and new, leapfrogged the > other dynamic languages with innovative design, all while incorporating > the spirit and flavor of Perl, so former Perl developers would largely > embrace it.... > > Oh yeah, Perl 6. > > When Perl 6 for hit the scene, I don't think enough Perl developers were > ready to jump ship to it, even if it had been production ready. Now that > it is finally getting close to being usable, is it still innovative, or > more on parity with the competition? > > -Tom > > -- > Tom Metro > Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA > "Enterprise solutions through open source." > Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
