On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 03:36:35PM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> I like Perl too. And C. Not so fond of Java. Am trying to learn Haskell.
> Does that make me weird?
No, i don't think so. But programming languages are a religious topic,
aren't they? Often i think people just feel threatened by things they
don't understand. (I'll admit that my antipathy towards C++ probably
has a lot to do with that: it's large and complex, and I've never
had to use it in anger, so it frightens me a little.)
Tcl is certainly an interesting language, and notably simple to
integrate with C. I find it starts to creak horribly if you try
to build large/complex systems in it, but it works well for simple
tasks. Its use by Vignette and AOLServer as an embedded template
language is a good application for it IMHO. (of course they're both
moving to Java for fashion reasons now.)
And everyone likes C, don't they? :-)
I also think Java is a decent paradigmatic OO language, that its
standard libraries are good enough, and that the power of many of its
public APIs (the J2EE family, JAXP etc) is unparalleled. Or rather,
the APIs themselves may be occasionally substandard; but the fact that
several different working implementations of them tend to exist gives
them tremendous force. I can't imagine Perl catching up in this area
in the near future.
I also adore Haskell. You can tell it was designed by academics (i.e.
it's tremendously intellectually satisfying but not terribly
*useful*); but one thing the Perl community definitely shows is that
cool hacks can quickly become Serious Tools. Just look at the proposed
language design for Perl 6, which includes a lot of ideas which were
originally proposed just for their hack value. I keep meaning to look
at ocaml, which sacrifices a little cuteness (e.g. normal order
evaluation) for a _lot_ of performance.
Hmm.
.robin.
--
"It really depends on the architraves." --Harl
