On 12/26/06, Aaron J. Grier <[email protected]> wrote:
> Are you proposing that programming languages should be rigid and > unsuitable for a wide range of tasks? I propose nothing of the sort. I propose that perl's generality tends to cause reimplementation of many wheels, even if CPAN (or perl's builtins) contain well known "best- practices" implementations. moreso, I propose that perl's "there's more than one way to do it" slogan encourages unnecessary reimplementation, and perl's generality encourages application of perl to problem spaces where it is not well suited.
... while still being surprisingly shit at problem spaces which it should absolutely rule. For example: web applications. It's just file access, text handling and database interfaces. Perl in a Nutshell! Perl 5 is sucky in many ways, but even so, it should have completely owned the web app domain. All that was needed was just a little extra work to provide a nice environment to ease the absolute beginner into web app building. It even had a head start over Java, ASP and PHP, none of which were remotely as good. Face it, to lose the space to something as horrific as PHP, you'd have to *really* fuck up. Fortunately for PHP, the Perl community picked up that challenge and went the extra mile in fucking up spectacularly. They didn't just drop the ball; they cloned the ball a hundred different times and then threw it wildly all over the place, mostly up into trees. Then they said the whole ball game was beneath them and mocked the very idea that it was a problem space worth working in. When they eventually got back into it, the first thing they said was that there still weren't enough balls. Seriously, there is no bigger indictment of Perl and its community that I can think of than the fact that PHP won. Barman! Hate for EVERYONE! -- Yoz
