Re: virii

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Thatcher Ulrich <tu@tulrich.com> writes:

> * Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>:
> >  
> >  So, we've got a complicated, ill-designed language, implemented by folks
> >  who are more swayed by hype than by solid technical and logical reasoning.
> >  Sounds like a winner to me!  (<sound of Richard retching in the corner>)
> 
> And yet, Perl is wildly successful.  Maybe Perl's design choices aren't so
> misguided?

And yet, Windows is wildly successful.  Maybe Windows's design choices
aren't so misguided?

Frankly, I think a lot of the reason Perl is so successful is that it is so
good for quick 50-line scripts, so people (including myself) tend to use it
for that.  The problem is that 50-line scripts have a way of becoming
500-line scripts, then 5000-line scripts, and I would argue that Perl is
fundamentally ill-suited for that sort of situation---or, at least, much
worse at those kinds of programs than other languages.  So many people,
though, believe that it's far too much trouble to go rewrite the program in
another language that's better suited to the task.

Plus, most programmers out there don't really have a very wide range of
languages to choose from.  Compared to C and C++, Perl looks pretty good.
It even scores a few points over Java.  So, even if a programmer might be
willing to rewrite the program in a better language, the chances that he
knows a better language well enough to do the job are pretty slim.  (The 4
weeks of Lisp/ML/whatever he had in his survey-of-languages course as an
undergrad don't count.)

So, yeah, Perl is pretty successful.  This is due more, IMO, to market
forces than to technical superiority.  And I can cite you any number of
examples, like the one above, where the two don't produce the same results.

Richard


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