Paul Graham may not find much success as a futurist, but it is a rarified profession. In fairness, much of his article was toungue-planted-firmly-in-cheek, and it would be foolish to consider it to be a thoughtful critique of, say, XML, which is also referenced.

One big opportunity for improving perl will be making the punctuation easier to use, for example, the Perl 6 improvement that will allow me to write @var[5] instead of $var[5].

The idea of using punctuation to mark variables is a big part of the success of perl. It makes it possible to add keywords to the language without breaking old code. Much of my C code used a variable named 'new', which didn't work out so well in the next version of the language.

For more than 30 years, I have written in languages that mark the variables in a way similar to perl's. I expect that this idea will survive the next 100 years of language design.

Graham is trying to inspire thought about which computer language ideas will survive the next 100 years.

A good professor teaches you how to think, not what to think. Lacking that, he or she just asks interesting questions.

"To understand the past, you must understand the future." - William Gibson (?)

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma