On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 01:32:26PM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> In that case, how exactly has it forgotten its roots? I mean, in what
> way is it not as useful as it was before?
[Please forgive the following marketspeak]
The issue isn't that Perl is less useful now. It's that it's shifted
on the utility curve. Five years ago, N units of effort would produce
a value of 1.5 N to 10 N. (The variance describes the cost of that
effort; learning a programmign language is more costly to a graphic
designer than a CS grad student).
Today, that same effort is producing less value, perhaps less than
1:1 for some. This isn't an isolated ecosystem, and some languages
offer 1:2 or .5:3 [hypothetical] cost:benefit ratios (e.g. Python,
Ruby), while others offer 1:.5 (e.g. C++, proprietary languages).
Now, these aren't solid numbers, nor is this a valid economic/marketing
argument. It's just trying to describe how the perceived value of
learning Perl (or learning more Perl) is declining over time because
of the perceived complexity.
In other words, why should someone learn *more* idiosyncracies and
complexities when they can spend the same amount of time learning
Python?
Z.
