Perl is dead

[Paul Makepeace]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:16 PM, James Laver <james.laver at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2008-12-03 20:10, "Avleen Vig" <avleen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's a singular datapoint, but to answer the "how many python jobs..",
>> I would ask "how many engineers has Google hired in London in the last
>> few years?
>> It's *one* job application with lots of hires, many of whom will have
>> to use python at some point.
>> Other companies have probably done the same.
>>
>> But I don't believe the same is true with Perl.
>> Perl is fairly well entrenched. It's available everywhere. But Python
>> is still growing and has a lot of headroom.
>> Most people have tried Perl. The number trying Python and Ruby instead
>> is growing. Fast.
>>
>> I like Python too and wish the same.
>> I like that is enforces structure. I'd donate a kidney if perl could
>> be made to do that.
>
> It's not the place of a language to do that, it's a case of "Don't be an
> idiot when writing code".

=from http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Techdoc/Lore/famous.bug
1. A bug in a FORTRAN program that controlled one of the inner planet fly-bys
   (I think it was a fly-by of Mercury).  The bug was caused because the
   programmer inadvertently said DO 10 I=1.5 instead of DO 10 I=1,5.  FORTRAN
   interprets the former as "assign a value of 1.5 to the variable DO10I".  I
   heard that as a result the fly-by went off course and never did the fly-by!
   A good case for using variable declarations.
=cut

use strict; use warnings; use Class::Contract; etc etc etc All these
things are there to prevent humans being idiots.

That page has a lot of other awesome software failures, btw. See also
http://thedailywtf.com/

> I've seen crappy python and other code often enough, you can't fix it inside
> the language, you have to fix the programmer.

Humans aren't very reliable* so the more the language and the compiler
can help out the better.

*especially so with age, altho' I couldn't possibly comment...

P

> --James
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