John Siracusa skribis 2005-06-18 20:35 (-0400): > On 6/18/05 8:28 PM, Juerd wrote: > > The unix shell and things resembling it will still be in use much fifteen > > years after today, Perl 5 will not. > Ooo, a bold prediction :)
Do you really think so? I think that there is no way that Perl 5 can survive another 15 years. It used to be the best tool for almost everything, but for some purposes there are already better tools. Perl 5 had a long life for a dynamic language, but it's fading quickly. Web monkeys choose PHP now (they wouldn't have if our interpreters were light weight and mod_perl could be more like mod_php), larger systems are more and more written in Ruby and Python, and with PCRE, using regexes for basic string manipulation got easy in dozens of languages. The only things that really keeps Perl 5 alive (sort of) are CPAN and the community. The community is a fragile thing, and CPAN is more and more known as that uncontrolled place where any newbie can upload their templating engine and DBI wrapper. While unixish shells probably won't evolve much further. Microsoft is trying now, but their approach isn't needed in sh-land, because we've used those techniques for ages. The syntax is somewhat awkward, but if that's the only thing, you take it for granted because that keeps things compatible with existing code. Juerd -- http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
