LWN: Comments on "The Perl Future (Heise)"

The Perl Future (Heise)

sbergman27 — 2009-01-13T20:55:37+00:00

That no doubt used to be true. But looking at the requirements of my recent projects, Python comes out better. For example, I recently needed bindings for talking to Beagle search. The options are C#, C, and Python.

The Perl Future (Heise)

tjc — 2009-01-13T16:25:08+00:00

> JavaScript was perceived as a ghastly, hacky language, which was so awful that one had to hold ones nose to program in it.

That perception was mostly due to the early versions of the HTML DOM, not the language itself.

My only significant complaint with JavaScript is the overloaded addition/string concatenation operator, which isn't a very good idea in a dynamically typed language. It leads to a lot of extraneous typecasting.

The Perl Future (Heise)

frankie — 2009-01-13T15:16:25+00:00

> I suspect that more people use perl today, even if it is a smaller
> percentage, simply becouse there are more people involved.

I still use perl because there far more packages available than for any other scripting language: CPAN rules.

The Perl Future (Heise)

dlang — 2009-01-13T02:10:52+00:00

there have always been people who did't like perl, even in it's heyday. now many people who may have used perl use other languages (but many of those who are python fanatics never used perl to start with, becouse they didn't like it, so it's hard to consider them a 'loss' for perl)

perl is still used extensivly, but it's no longer the only game in town.

I suspect that more people use perl today, even if it is a smaller percentage, simply becouse there are more people involved.

The Perl Future (Heise)

jordanb — 2009-01-12T21:01:30+00:00

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

With JQuery, and the obsolescence of IE 5, Javascript is a *usable* language with a lot of annoying inconsistencies.

The Perl Future (Heise)

atai — 2009-01-12T20:41:18+00:00

Is this true, that

Perl's current standing is like that of JavaScript a few years ago. JavaScript was perceived as a ghastly, hacky language, which was so awful that one had to hold ones nose to program in it. With the rise of excellent JavaScript frameworks like Jquery, YUI, MooTools and Dojo and the publication of Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts, people are realising that it's actually a really nice language with occasional quirks.

If so, it is really sad for the once standard web programming language

The Perl Future (Heise)

nix — 2009-01-12T17:05:38+00:00

Exactly. It's a very good article, mentioning all sorts of stuff I wish I'd known about at this time last year (e.g. the joy that is Moose).

The Perl Future (Heise)

sbergman27 — 2009-01-12T17:04:00+00:00

... says the Perl groupie who didn't read past the first paragraph.

The Perl Future (Heise)

dreadnought — 2009-01-12T16:48:53+00:00

Don't waste your time.