Why Perl Didn't Win

Post by icambron » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 4:51 AM UTC

autarch wrote: post #36

I suspect that all the languages that are "winning" right now will have "lost" 10-20 years from now too. What's the longest lived language out there right now that's actually still in heavy use? I'd say C. But C has clearly fallen from its position of complete dominance when every new project was written in C (because it was much easier than writing assembly). C++ had its day as well and lives on in many places, but…

Post by tobinfricke » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 4:53 AM UTC

shadowfox wrote: post #35

amenbrother wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently asked to add some trivial code to the end of an existing unmaintained Perl script written long ago. Something along the lines of $x = `cat FOO 2>/dev/null`; if ($x == "foo") { system("BAR"); } When I tested it I found BAR was executed no matter what FOO contained without any errors or warnings. WTF? After a little more searching I found the problem was that I should have written $x = `cat FOO 2>/dev/nu…

This sort of distinction exists in other languages though: Java has == and equals. OCaml has = and == etc. (Not that Perl doesn't have its issues; but this is very low in that list imho)

Post by Roboprog » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 4:57 AM UTC

Roboprog wrote: post #34

EdwardDiego wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the "Enterprise!" developer pool, there's Java. The 500 line methods are still hard to slog through, though. Great straw-man there. I didn't realise that javac required 500 line methods before compilation. > In which case, the language of mandate doesn't matter much. It's a lot easier to pass two collections to a method in Java than to a sub in Perl.

--- Java --- List aList = Arrays.asList( new int [] { 1, 3, 5 }); // probably missing some more type stuff in Map aMap = new HashMap (); aMap.put( "name", "Joe"); aMap.put( "ID", "42"); // I need to check if Java 8 has map literals a la Groovy... doSomething( aList, aMap); ... void doSomething( List aList, Map aMap) { System.out.println( "First: " + aList.get( 0) + ", Name: " + aMap.get( "name") ); } --- Perl --- &do…

Post by amenbrother » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 4:58 AM UTC

shadowfox wrote: post #35

amenbrother wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently asked to add some trivial code to the end of an existing unmaintained Perl script written long ago. Something along the lines of $x = `cat FOO 2>/dev/null`; if ($x == "foo") { system("BAR"); } When I tested it I found BAR was executed no matter what FOO contained without any errors or warnings. WTF? After a little more searching I found the problem was that I should have written $x = `cat FOO 2>/dev/nu…

This sort of distinction exists in other languages though: Java has == and equals. OCaml has = and == etc. (Not that Perl doesn't have its issues; but this is very low in that list imho)

Post by kamaal » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 4:59 AM UTC

icambron wrote: post #41

autarch wrote: post #36

I suspect that all the languages that are "winning" right now will have "lost" 10-20 years from now too. What's the longest lived language out there right now that's actually still in heavy use? I'd say C. But C has clearly fallen from its position of complete dominance when every new project was written in C (because it was much easier than writing assembly). C++ had its day as well and lives on in many places, but…

I agree with your point but not the scare quotes. Yes, the field evolves, priorities change, and languages inevitably fall out of favor. However, that losing is inevitable doesn't make the losing less real, and I think it's still very useful to think about why a language fell out of favor. What changes in priority left the language behind? What could have made it more adaptive? What does that say about current progra…