On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Dave Cross wrote: > I worry that if we take the first option then Perl will be dead in five > years. I worry that you keep saying that. Why? What is your concern, exactly?
I think the worst case scenario is that Perl could end up being like Cobol is today -- old, ugly, and unloved, but a lot of working systems depend on it years after they were written, so the need to maintain it (and to have developers that understand it) will remain into the forseeable future, until such time that these systems can be reimplemented in something newer (which may not be worth the effort in the first place). If that counts as a dead language, then okay I agree with you -- it is a danger (though in my mind not a huge one). But that doesn't sound *that* bad to me. It's not like Perl is going to disappear completely, is it? I don't think so. I think Perl's blessing & curse is that it got so tightly bound to the web and thus the dotcom hype, and now that dotcom has gone dotbomb, Perl may be getting dragged down with it. Maybe. But Perl was useful before the web came along, and it will of course remain useful if the web were to go away. The problem is the perception that Perl is bound to the web, which clearly isn't true, and needs to be changed. -- Chris Devers "People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"
