Re: I miss Perl.

>It accepted all philosophies
>equally and without shame.

That's not true at all.  Just because there's more than one way to
do it doesn't mean that all possible ways are good ones.  Sometimes,
they aren't, and you must reject the bad ones.

If Perl hadn't rejected some aspects of C, for example, it would
have been just like C.  Likewise for the shell.  Or Python for that
matter.  Must we--and if so, *why* must we--"accept without shame"
Python's philosophy of white-space blocking or of its lack of
scoping?  Must we not also embrace shamelessly C's philosophies of
strict typing and lack of memory management?  And mustn't we
shamelessly cozy up to the shell's enchanting philosophy of multiple
evaluation levels?  Of course not.  We didn't, and we shouldn't.
And we won't.

Not all ideas are good ones, nor are all philosophies equal.
Different does not mean equal, or good.  Different does not mean
not-equal, either, or not-good.  It just depends.  It's a myth that
Perl is now or ever was an unconsidered, random selection of creeping
features from infinite sources.  It's not.  Sometimes it might seem
that way, but it really isn't.  It's for the most part a carefully
chosen and non-random selection.  Some ideas, some *philosophies*,
happen to fit in better than others.

--tom

• Re: I miss Perl. by Tom Christiansen
• Re: I miss Perl. by Ted Ashton
• I miss Perl. by Damien Neil
• Re: I miss Perl. by Larry Wall
• Re: I miss Perl. by Elaine -HFB- Ashton
• Re: I miss Perl. by Larry Wall
• Re: I miss Perl. by Elaine -HFB- Ashton