On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 09:40 AM, Garrett Goebel wrote:
Seriously, everyone read Damian's "Seven Deadly Sins" thing, if ya haven't read/heard it already. It's quite short, and quite good at pointing out Things That Suck about programming languages.Or for the extremely thick: GOOD: Separate syntax for indexed vs. named lookups BAD: Same syntax with >= 2 contextual meanings
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf
<out-of-place-rant>It's worse than that, IMO. Think of all the businesses that benefit from Perl... it's bloody *everywhere*. It's the, what, fourth most popular language, after C/C++/Java, according to that monster-job-search-based-statistic on slashdot. And yet the entire population of the Perl-using planet can't support 4 or 5 full time designers/developers? Have we just not been effective in getting the word out, or are businesses truly that cheap? Does Perl need to be made into a commercially supported product, w/ venture capital, a'la other recent open source pkgs, in order to get funded?
I'm disappointed that The Perl Foundation (TPF) has been so quiet and
unresponsive on support for our core language designers and architects. I
dropped a note to all the TPF contacts over a week ago, and have yet to
receive a reply. It is a sad state of affairs when a language as prevalent
as Perl and with such a strong sense of community can be so disorganized and
lacking when it comes to financial sustenance.
</out-of-place-rant>
MikeL
