I never understood this point. Generally, I work with a constrained subset of Perl, because you don’t need all of it all of the time, and my code is extremely consistent and regular. When I’m in a hurry, it’s the structure of my programs that suffers, never the syntactic clarity. That’s something that no language on Earth will ever save me from.

I’ve looked at Ruby and I’ve looked at Python, but I don’t see any point in switching. Python just doesn’t fit the way I think – for me, trying to work in it is like someone keeps tugging at your legs or arms every couple of moments while you’re trying to carry a bunch of big boxes from one place to another: it’s impossible to get into the flow. Ruby, OTOH, is very very nice. I like it. However, when I look at what it offers over my use of Perl, there’s the clean, get-out-my-way OO system, … and well that’s it. In terms of expressiveness and power, all of these languages are on equal footing. Nothing that can be done in one of them takes significantly more or less effort in either of the other two.

So I don’t understand how one of these languages can present a problem for a particular codebase that another would not.

At this point, if I were to switch, it’d have to be to a new, distinctly more powerful language, probably a somewhat unusual one – maybe Haskell. Most likely I will laze around until I slip into Perl 6. But Python and Ruby just don’t outpace Perl 5 in any significant fashion.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^3: Perl is dying by Aristotle
in thread Perl is dying by Anonymous Monk

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