On 31/01/13 09:10, Johan Vromans wrote:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/29/0235220/perls-glory-days-are-behind-it-but-it-isnt-going-anywhere
We know we suck at marketing, but is there anything we are going to do
about it?
-- Johan
Did C ever make serious money? What was the evolution rate of C? Is C or
not the basis of systems programming?
My point is that a good language withstands time because its useful.
Perl (5) is in use and will be in use. Not because is bad/good and/or
Perl 6 will come into place, but due to a fact it has a domain. And Perl
has a domain not because other languages cannot do what Perl does, but
due to the fact they cannot do it the WAY Perl does.
The way a language is constructed semantically has a one to one
correspondence with the way your brain works. For some people, Perl's
syntax hits a sweet spot and they stick to it. For others, it is
confusing, alien and can - apparently - make you a bad programmer (I
have seen bad programmers in every programming language I know, so
that's not a characteristic of Perl).
In the same way, people that parallel program, work with Intel's
extensions/compilers, CUDA and/or Erlang. Try to convince an Erlang
programmer that his language is obsolete. They will laugh at you and
point out many examples.
Conclusion: A language is walking down the road of obsolescence when its
semantic structure becomes irrelevant to the way people think and its
domain dies. Neither of that is true for Perl (5) and the whole shebang
has very little to do with Perl 6. Frankly, I do not see any original
point in this article, IMHO.
Best regards,
--
--
George Magklaras PhD
RHCE no: 805008309135525
Head of IT/Senior Systems Engineer
Biotechnology Center of Oslo and
the Norwegian Center for Molecular Medicine/
Vitenskapelig Databehandling (VD) -
Research Computing Services
EMBnet TMPC Chair
http://folk.uio.no/georgios
http://hpc.uio.no
Tel: +47 22840535
