This statement reflects something I've said many many times before and I'll say yet again, Perl needs to be more OS agnostic. The fact that it's severly Unix biased is not A Good Thing(TM). Perl has so much to offer for developers of all platforms (and speaking from my perspective, most certainly Win32 and Unix), but there's noone that can convince me that it really "feels" like a Win32 language in any way as much as it does a Unix one. (I happen to use both OS's).
And I'll disagree with that. Perl's target market is Unix hackers. It's a toolbox for Unix. The fact that it also tries to be cross-platform is secondary in goal. I would not want any decisions made to increase portability at the expense of how well it hacks on Unix any more than I'd want Perl to be easier for beginners at the expense of experts.

Certainly, if you can add or modify a feature to make it more portable without damaging the Unix interface, I'm for that.

But let's take a common complaint: the unlink operator. Everyone not familiar with hacking C on Unix wants to rename that to something like the delete operator. No. I say no. The prime market for Perl is still the Unix hackers who are moving cross-languages, not "scripting hackers" (whatever that is) moving cross-platforms. The word unlink has a very specific meaning to Unix hackers, and helps us get the job done faster.

Perl fills the niche as well as it does because it did stay focussed on what was important for Unix hackers.

If you want vendor-neutral, equally inefficient code on all platforms, you know where to find Java.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Perl's warts by merlyn
in thread Perl's warts by grinder

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