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Why Perl Didn't Win
91–100 of 187 posts
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#92[deleted]
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#93[deleted]
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tcl was and still is undiscovered gold.
I'm very glad that only game writers are using Tcl for scripting their games. It's a godawful language I'd never want to maintain any real software in. Python and Ruby are bad, but Tcl is a degenerate joke. Let's please leave it undiscovered.
Tcl is the major scripting language used by all FPGA vendors, and sadly it doesn't look like it is going away. You can call Python from it, but FPGA developers (especially those Windows) will make a big fuss about installing an external tool, and should they install Python2 or Python3? Also, the major FPGA programming languages (vhdl and verilog) make tcl look great (or any other language, for that matter).
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#95You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…
The irony here, then, is that Perl 5 took the object system that Python had in 1995 as an example to emulate.
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole point about Perl 6 is that it breaks backwards compatibility I think this is is a contributor to why Perl 6 will never amount to anything. That boat has sailed. Python 3 broke backwards compatibility and to my knowledge everybody is still using Python 2. Python has a lot of energy right now, so that might save it, or it might go the way of Perl when the next cool language comes out and everybody jumps shi…
Everybody IN ENTERPRISE is still using Python 2. Realistically, most of the Python ecosystem is compatible 2+3, we are seeing new libraries and programs compatible 3.3+-only, and there's no broad reason to use Python 2 anymore, with minor exceptions.
> and there's no broad reason to use Python 2 anymore, with minor exceptions.
If you count big chunks of legacy python 2 code a "minor exception", I agree.
Anyway, the big difference between python 2 -> 3 transition and the Perl 5 and Perl 6 coexistence is that nobody within the Perl community tried to end-of-live Perl 5.
Yes, that means less incentives for migrating to Perl 6, but it also reduces the risk for Perl 5 users.
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tcl was and still is undiscovered gold.
I'm very glad that only game writers are using Tcl for scripting their games. It's a godawful language I'd never want to maintain any real software in. Python and Ruby are bad, but Tcl is a degenerate joke. Let's please leave it undiscovered.
You may be pleased to learn that game developers do not use Tcl for scripting these days and, indeed, few ever have; see http://wiki.tcl.tk/40487. Their embedded language of choice is, by a large margin, Lua.
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#98Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7866834
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tcl was and still is undiscovered gold.
I'm very glad that only game writers are using Tcl for scripting their games. It's a godawful language I'd never want to maintain any real software in. Python and Ruby are bad, but Tcl is a degenerate joke. Let's please leave it undiscovered.
That said, the saving grace for Tcl were things like Expect and Tk. I don't think I ever used it for anything else....
Re: Why Perl Didn't Win
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems so. * Perl 6: almost everyone is on Perl 5, or switched to another language * Python 3: many libraries and devs will stick with Python 2, several devs switched to Go * PHP 6: unicode rewrite never released, new features backported to 5.3+, several books were published in advance with PHP 6 in the title, next release will be named PHP 7 to avoid confusion * Lua 5.2+: half of the community stuck with 5.1 as su…
What can we learn from this? That we shouldn't attempt major changes that aren't backwards compatible?
I guess we should learn to design languages with extensibility in mind from the outset, so that later incompatible changes are much less likely to be necessary.