On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 09:40 AM, Garrett Goebel wrote:
Or for the extremely thick:
GOOD: Separate syntax for indexed vs. named lookups
BAD: Same syntax with = 2 contextual meanings
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.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf
out-of-place-rant
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
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?
MikeL
