Re: virii
Fri, 26 Jul 2002 19:27:38 +0100
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> :
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 10:06:16AM -0700, Craig Dickson wrote:
>> and a genuine Stanford linguist of my acquaintance who is also a
>> programmer regards Perl as an absolute horror.
>That one's probably not relevant. Many programmers hate Perl, while many
>programmers love it. I happen to love it, but if I were a linguist then
>that wouldn't automatically mean that Perl was linguistically good;
>conversely your friend disliking it doesn't automatically mean that it's
> linguistically bad. Opinions often vary.
Also: this discussion may have been skewed by differing definitions.
Commonly & loosely, `linguist' means someone versed in several
languages;
technically, linguistics concerns the nature & structure of language in
general.
Larry Wall & Tom Christiansen seem uncommonly familiar with etymology,
grammar, usage, & the like. (As am I, necessarily, being a practicing
editor.) Whether they consider themselves linguists I can't tell you,
but those aspects of human language may help the rest of us understand
Perl.
To that extent, at least, the instigator of this thread has a point.
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