On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 02:17 PM, Joseph F. Ryan wrote:
'kay, let it be noted that I had let that first little zing slide, but I do think we need to be more careful here. I don't think any aspect of this discussion is hinged on people being 'ignorant' of perl5 behaviors, unless 'ignorant' is a new synonym for 'disagree with'.Mark J. Reed wrote:On 2003-01-17 at 19:00:04, Simon Cozens wrote:This is plainly untrue. See the "perlsub" documentation, which talks about
"creating your own syntax" with the & prototype. You can do all this in
Perl 5, and it saddens me that some of the people redesigning Perl don't
know what Perl can do.
Well, if even some of the people redesigning the language are ignorant of some of its capabilities, that is an argument for making those capabilities easier to discover, and maybe even more intuitive to use, in the new design.I see it more as the people who are ignorant of the features of Perl5 should go RTFM (Research The Features that they are Making?)
Argument by emotion has drawbacks. I could, for example, point out that everyone bitches about how the language needs to be more regular, until you point out an irregularity that they like. Or that people want the language to be cleanly object oriented, unless it means making things act more like objects.
And Lord help us if we get into an argument about whether or not putting code on CPAN makes you more of an 'expert' programmer than someone who writes proprietary code for money. Or what 'expert' means, when it comes to Perl, and whether or not such technical prowess is solely proportional to your visibility at Perl-related conferences. Or if Perl5 syntax is truly the pinnacle of language design against no other ideas can hold a candle.
So. If people wanted to point out the merits of the old C<map> syntax, _aside_ from the fact that Perl5-did-it-that-way, that would be wonderful.
But name-calling needs to go. Let's not light that fuse, OK?
:-|
MikeL
