At 11:55 AM 11/19/2001 -0500, Ken Fox wrote:
>Simon Cozens wrote:
> > Us: We're working on this, that and the other.
> > Them: Pshaw. We solved those problems thirty years ago.
>
>Were Perl and Python both grouped into the same category
>of re-inventing the wheel?
More or less. Oddly enough, for all the (good-natured) shots taken at perl,
it was the only practical language that *had* shots taken at it. The rest
of the languages that were running below the radar. (Well, OK, there was C
and Scheme, but in that case I was the one taking the shots so it doesn't
count... :) Python's got a good shot at things, as it seems to be the
'dirty little secret' of the academic world--it's the practical language
people admit to using when they're actually doing something.
I've reasonably good hope for Ruby, too, but nobody seemed to have heard of
it. That's hopefully changed. (I made a point of mentioning it, as it is a
really nice language and one of our targets)
>Or is this just the academic distaste for Perl syntax showing through?
Sort of. It really wasn't that bad, though. There's also something to be
said about being the language getting shot at--people are taking us
seriously enough to snipe.
>I had hoped that
>the Perl 6 effort, especially Damian's influence, might
>gain respect for Perl in the academic community. Doesn't
>sound like it though.
It's far too early for that. Maybe in a year.
>What new and interesting things did the "Them" crowd
>talk about?
Not much, but that wasn't the point. They were as much there to talk about
all the old stuff we didn't know as anything else. It was really a "here's
where we are, here's where you are, let's talk" thing. The corridor chats
were as interesting as the talks, too.
I'm really hoping we have another of these. This was a get to know each
other thing, so maybe the next will have more information exchange. There
were a few too many presentations, and some folks (not mentioning any names
like, say, mine...) went a bit too long, so there was a limit to the time
available for public discourse, but it was cool.
Oh, and if anyone's interested, while I say a lot of the languages these
days are just Algol with a funny hat, putting a hat that says "Hey, look,
I'm Algol!" on Scheme does *not* make it algol with a funny hat... :)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
