Jonathan Ellis wrote:
Which is the long way of saying, I hope the the distinction between
"putting down Perl" and "putting down Perl programmers" is not lost
here.
Well, you put down programmers, not the language, when you said "That's
why these days you mostly see sysadmins and other not-really-experienced
developers using Perl." Even if no one in the group takes such a remark
personally, it's more likely to invite flames than useful discussion. I
think most of us don't like to wade through flames.
Look, if a language is known primarily for being prone to degenerate
into spaghetti if everyone isn't very careful, something's wrong,
and when the best apology is pointing out that you can write bad Lisp
or Python or Smalltalk if you really _try_, well, I think we all know
what that means even if some of us (obviously not me) are too polite
to say it. :)
Personally, I'm less interested in which language is most productive and
more interested in seeing language design experiments. The design of a
language strongly influences the way programmers think, and I'd like to
discover the best ways to think.
I consider Perl to be an ongoing experiment with only early conclusions.
I used to think that the C experiment was complete, but then I wrote
some microcontroller code last year using CC5X, which implements a
variant of C. This variant has no pointers. It turned out to be easier
to write than JAL, a high level language designed for microcontrollers.
I was quite surprised; clearly there's something there for me to learn.
Shane
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