[OT] perl and CLRs

[Peter Hickman]

Dirk Koopman wrote:
> Sometime ago I asked the question as to whether it was worth looking 
> at producing a CLR such as monos (or even [spit] .NET).
>
> http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/05/01/microsoft_open_source_dot_net/
>
> It seems to me that although the people that replied said "it couldn't 
> be done", all the other major scripting languages have (or nearly 
> have) managed it. I can't believe that producing a mono/.NET backend 
> for perl is impossible - it might be limited, it may well break 
> modules in CPAN.

Well here's a problem then, imagine getting people to use Perl without 
CPAN. I have a choice of programming languages to use but I use Perl 
mostly because there is a good chance that somewhere on CPAN is a module 
that will get me 99.9999% of the way there. Without it I might as well 
be writing everything in tcl. Perl runs everywhere that .NET run and 
more besides how would limiting the platforms that Perl can be run on an 
cutting the number of modules available be justified?

> But it *is* the way the world is going and it does leverage work done 
> elsewhere.
If you are just interested in following the herd then become a J2EE 
developer, oops that is another direction that the world seems to be 
going in. Lets enumerate:

* cperl (as is)
* Parrot
* .NET
* JVM

There are much more compelling reasons to get Perl on the JVM than on .NET

>
> Do we *really* want to continue to hold our noses in the air?
You are mistaking indifference with contempt. I couldn't give a toss 
about .NET and I have no interest in what David Beckham is up to this 
week either.

-- 
Peter Hickman.

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