On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Now, I would agree that there are more C hackers about. However, many
> people are graduating college with computer science degrees having worked
> mostly in Java and very little in C. In 6 years or so, we may find that
> there are more Java hackers than C hackers about. But, I agree this alone
> isn't a reason to pick Java.
That's an interesting theory. Want to hear another one? People that only
learn Java in college and never go on to learn other languages aren't
going to be developing Perl. Why? They didn't learn Perl in college
either. On the other hand, the smart ones will realize pretty quickly
that a huge proportion of the best software is written in C. It's not too
hard to figure out that C might be a good language to learn.
Bottom line: is C's lifespan finite? Certainly. Is Java the replacement?
I serriously doubt it.
> I already knew that "writing the canonical Perl6 implementation in Java was
> likely a lost cause. ;) However, I hope we won't confuse this issue with the
> one of making it possible to port Perl to non-C environments. Such
> environments do exist, and they do matter, IMO.
I'm a jerk, so I have to ask: do they exist? What platform are you
talking about where there exists a JVM and where no C compiler can target
the architecture? How did they write the JVM with no C compiler?
However, point taken. The easier we can make porting Perl the better.
> I don't know if that is proven. We still lack a port to the JVM, while our
> "sister languages" like Python, Scheme, Tcl, Eiffel and the like all have
> JVM ports.
Little languages are much more portable than big ones. Ok, I don't really
know if that covers Eiffel and Python but I'm pretty sure it covers Tcl
and Scheme. You can write interpreters for those languages in
surprisingly little code.
-sam
