Paul Graham on great hackers

Paul Graham on great hackers

I don't think Perl is growing as quickly as it used to be. In the late 90'ies, it seems, it was probably *the* open source programming language, after C. Remember when mod_perl was a happening web technology? I think Java and PHP blew it out of the water (the web).

Of course it's still useful, and I really like Paul's comments, but I think Perl is not really the standard to judge by any more. The most popular language right now is probably Python.

But there is a huge amount of pressure to use Java for everything. They have managed to get a brand that open source languages don't have, and they have a ton of installed code at this point. Libs, courses, books, and so on. Of course, Paul's right, it tends to be a language that tries to keep stupid people from making mistakes in a large group, rather than helping out the clever ones.

And meanwhile, here I am with Tcl... which I still think is a brilliant concept as far as a language. Don't tell me marketing doesn't matter, because bad marketing has hurt Tcl a lot.

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