Re: Re: perl's forte

Hear! Hear!

Magical and marvelous, Perl something I expect to find tucked away in a corner of Jack Vance's Library At the End of the World (in 'The Dying Earth' and other stories), with lots of forgotten and only partially understood spells just glowing in the dim light.

I have been keeping up in a fashion with the Perl6-ery, and it sounds like a 'best practices' rebuild. Functional, but kinda of soul-less. It will have its own quirks, being Perl, but I am going to miss my '->'....

A couple of years back at a PerlCon someone likened Perl to an old Hippie -- kind of odd and funky, tie-dyed and whimsical, but a hell of a lot of fun to be around. Perl was written as the People's Programming language. Java is an attempt by the Computer Sciences departments to recover the programming mystique and bottle it back up in the Ivory Tower. Perl and Java are "Power to the People" versus "The Religious Hierophonts".

----
I Go Back to Sleep, Now.

OGB

Comment on Re: Re: perl's forte

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Re: Re: Re: perl's forte by hardburn (Abbot) on Mar 19, 2004 at 17:26 UTC
Java is an attempt by the Computer Sciences departments to recover the programming mystique and bottle it back up in the Ivory Tower. If that were true, it would probably have offered a lot more OO features in version 1 than are even in the current version of the language. The only thing it arguably got right over C++ from a CS point of view was disallowing multiple inheirtance (which also means it's not there when you really do need it, except in a really hackish way). Java's design is more like C++, but much simplier. You'll see plenty of comparisons between it and C++ that show development time is sharply reduced using Java. They're probably right, but then again, I don't think there are many people who will argue that C++ is a simple langauge to begin with. So I'm not impressed with such a comparison. I think that if Java really was designed as a CS Ivory Tower language, it might be a lot better. There have been a lot of cool ideas developed since C++ was invented that Java doesn't include (though some are poping up in Perl6). ---- `: () { :\|:& };:` Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Re: perl's forte by flyingmoose (Priest) on Mar 19, 2004 at 23:52 UTC
I think that if Java really was designed as a CS Ivory Tower language, it might be a lot better. Java is designed to limit the flexibility of mediocre programmers through highly strict interfaces and a high-activation-function to overcome the pain of the standard library and the castrated OO system and syntax. Yes, the standard library is powerful, but no more than CPAN (Java is technically weaker -- they accept the minimum set of commonality across platforms, hence no Authen::PAM equivalent for Java), and certaintly not more so than the c-libraries on my Linux box. And there are the platform-specific JVM bugs and various problems that you won't get Sun to fix no matter how hard you try...CS departments use Java only because industry is controlling, and students want buzzword-compliant jobs. "Ivory Tower" CS languages are designed to be supremely powerful and resemble the incantations of wizardry. Of course, you occasionally drift into implementing things recursively when they should not, etc, etc ... which can be a sign of the wizards getting too fond of showing off. Fortunately Perl is closer to the later, and will be more so with Perl6.	[reply]


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