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Postings from May 2001
On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:01:47PM -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote: > It seems to me that recently (the last two years or so) and especially with > 6, perl is no longer the SAs friend. It is no longer a fun litle language > that can be easily used to hack out solutions to problems. See, I have a basic problem with this. Whatever you were doing with perl4 ten years ago, you can still do with perl 5.6.1 (mod a few minor differences) by simply ignoring all the new features. Perl can be taught/learned as a small, fun language (where 'fun' is a highly relative term). In fact, there's an O'Reilly book out just for that purpose, "Perl For System Administration". While there are arguments about unnecessary language bloat and what should be in the core and what should be relegated to modules (see also, Second System Effect) if you take this too far you wind up with a Luddite philosophy to language design. "I don't need feature X, so neither does anyone else!" There's little need for a language fork. The simple things will remain simple (and hopefully simpler) and the hard things will remain possible (and hopefully a bit more possible). Perhaps instead of proposing a fork, you could write up a new man page, "perlsmall" or something, describing just those "useful" features of Perl as a small utility language (enhanced shell scripting) and ignoring the "useless" stuff like OO and threads. -- Michael G. Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl6 Quality Assurance <perl-qa@perl.org> Kwalitee Is Job One Let's enjoy the traditional custom in Peru of getting leprosy.Thread Previous | Thread Next