On Oct 15, 2005, at 9:57 AM, David Storrs wrote:
I would suggest we avoid trying to link Perl6 with Web2.0 in
people's minds, at least at first. One of the uphill battles that
I'm really tired of fighting is convincing people that Perl is good
for more than CGIs and quick-n-dirty system administration hacks.
We don't need to throw fuel on that fire by "nicheing" ourselves
right at the start.
Well, I first learned Perl (Perl 4 at the time) so that I could use
it for CGI, and my interest in Perl started to wane in part because I
had moved on to other things. I've been doing a lot of work in an
ancient language known as MUMPS for the last 10 years or so. It's a
language providing, among other things, a rich set of string handling
functions, patterns, hierarchical associative arrays, etc. Perl
seemed attractive as a more modern (read: Algol-like) alternative to
M/MUMPS. But I never ended up using it as much as I expected I would.
I think what started me looking back at Perl was developing some UI
prototypes in Java (Swing). Maybe I just don't "get it", but I found
that the degree of coupling between presentation logic and business
logic to be appalling. Despite my best efforts, adding a few fields
to a simple patient lookup seemed to involve a lot more work than it
ought to (I work on medical information systems for the U.S. Dept. of
Veterans Affairs). M. J. Dominus' book "Higher Order Perl" caught my
eye (maybe because I have long been interested in computability
theory, and maybe because I had a good time learning LISP in
college). I know that Perl isn't a functional language, but I was
very impressed with what could be done with the language. (And now
that I've learned about pugs, I wonder if maybe I shouldn't run off
and learn Haskell!) Anyway, I've been thinking a lot lately about
maintainability of large scale systems. about 5 years ago, I was
given the task of parsing through millions of lines (literally) of
source code and building what is essentially a dependency graph. That
really made an impression on me. It just seems that no one ever
should have to do anything like that.
Okay, so maybe this is another niche, but it seems to me that complex
systems (and maybe health care in particular) is a natural area for a
language like Perl, and one well removed from CGI.
===
Gregory Woodhouse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Einstein was a giant. He had his head in the clouds and his feet on
the ground."
--Richard P. Feynman
