On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 3:19 PM, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote: > On Fri, 7 Jun 2013, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote: > >> David Lang wrote: >>> >>> Perl use may or may not be declining (depending on how you measure it), >>> but >>> are you really willing to take on the task of re-writing everything >>> that's >>> in Perl into another language and force all developers of scripts to >>> learn >>> that other language? what's the ROI of this? >> >> >> Let's not talk hypotheticals. git-svn.perl (+ perl/SVN/*.pl) is >> absolutely massive. It's an incredibly useful tool in that it >> actually works, and that there is nothing replacing it in the >> foreseeable future. This monster was written almost entirely by one >> brilliant person, and nobody is going to rewrite it. We don't start a >> huge discussion about what languages are "approved" before accepting >> such a contribution: if the contributor wants to write something in a >> dominant language (Perl in this case), and it's going to be useful, we >> merge it. End of story. > > > Well, Felipe is saying that Perl is dieing and we should re-write everything > that exists in Perl to Ruby.
No, I said we should try to move away from Perl. Move stuff to C, shell scripts, and yeah, Ruby. >> Why are we discussing something that is indeterminate? It is >> impossible to foresee the future, but that is no reason to freeze >> _present_ development. > > and it's not a reason to throw away existing stuff based on the argument > that Perl is dieing Who said anything about throwing away code? >> Nobody claimed that "press coverage" is a good metric. We can only >> talk about facts, and Felipe already showed you a TIOBE index graph. >> If you have overwhelming _evidence_ that Ruby is a weak language that >> will die soon, share it: otherwise, I see no value in this discussion. > > > TIOBE index graph is "press coverage" as far as I'm concerned. > > I'm not saying that Ruby in particular has a fatal flaw, I'm just > questioning the "Perl is dead, re-write everything in Ruby" mantra. > > The language that you choose to use when writing a new application is > related to things related to that type of application. > > Ruby is not an extremely common language for sysadmins to use. Who said we need a language commonly used by sysadmins for our Git core? > Perl remains a common language for these sorts of tasks, even if it's not > used for user visible applications. Ruby is pretty much a replacement for Perl. For every task Perl is good, Ruby also is. Ruby's syntax even borrows from Perl. The difference is; Ruby is better for many more tasks that suck in Perl. > Arguing that Perl is dieing, we need to abandon it is just wrong. Straw man. Nobody is arguing that. I said we should try to avoid it, not abandon it immediately. -- Felipe Contreras -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
