Re: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing

How about the middle ground?

Perhaps there is room in this world for More Than One Language, and perhaps the only important thing is that “the job gets done.” Python is also a very clever language, and in some ways it is extremely Lisp-like. On my computer I can type the perl command to get to one, and the python command to get to the other. Why does Perl (or Python) need an advocate or a defender? I am not in these areas of computing, but I nevertheless like both languages, know both, and in various situations choose one vs. the other. “Tools for the job,” you know, and tool boxes are pretty big. Always room for one more . . .

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Re^2: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing by hermida (Scribe) on Mar 15, 2011 at 00:26 UTC
There is definitely room for multiple languages and indeed there are, all of us agree with that. I think the discussion is not about whether the world needs multiple programming languages it's about how some are negatively and falsely painted. I make a serious point of spending lots of time to correct any falsehoods I find made about Perl typically by Python or Ruby programmers who don't know squat and haven't kept up with Perl in 5 years. As I've written before these false statements are never retracted even though they are proven to be false and they hang out on the web, get indexed, and people see them and start to believe them when they see all this crap. It's analogous to Fox Noise on TV, don't bother to retract any lies and then the lies become true.	[reply]

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Re^2: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing
by hermida (Scribe) on Mar 15, 2011 at 00:26 UTC

There is definitely room for multiple languages and indeed there are, all of us agree with that. I think the discussion is not about whether the world needs multiple programming languages it's about how some are negatively and falsely painted.

I make a serious point of spending lots of time to correct any falsehoods I find made about Perl typically by Python or Ruby programmers who don't know squat and haven't kept up with Perl in 5 years. As I've written before these false statements are never retracted even though they are proven to be false and they hang out on the web, get indexed, and people see them and start to believe them when they see all this crap. It's analogous to Fox Noise on TV, don't bother to retract any lies and then the lies become true.

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