Perl is dead

[Adeola Awoyemi]

On 4/12/08 15:03, Abigail wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 01:40:41PM +0000, Avleen Vig wrote:
>    
>> >  On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Robin Berjon<robin at berjon.com>  wrote:
>>      
>>> >  >  On Dec 4, 2008, at 13:33 , Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
>>>        
>>>> >  >>
>>>> >  >>  How do we reach people outside the community after having spent so much
>>>> >  >>  time talking to ourselves?
>>>>          
>>> >  >
>>> >  >  This is something that I don't have the technical know-how to accomplish,
>>> >  >  but a way of using Perl from within PHP, I'm guessing as a library
>>> >  >  extension, would provide a strong deployment vector into a large and
>>> >  >  talkative community that is often blissfully ignorant that there even is
>>> >  >  anything else. It would be a neat way to show cool tricks, and the power of
>>> >  >  CPAN. Doug MacEachern had suggested he was working on something like that
>>> >  >  ages ago, but I don't know if it went anywhere.
>>>        
>> >  
>> >  We could just ask people what the don't like about perl, or what
>> >  they'd like to see change / improve.
>> >  
>> >  They'll probably rattle off a list of things which they like about
>> >  other languages which they don't like in perl, but that's not
>> >  necessarily a bad thing. It might show us the strengths in other
>> >  languages that we lack?
>>      
>
> Hmmm. So, we go to Python people, and they gives a us a list of things
> they don't like about Perl. We go back to our woodshop, and turn Perl into
> Python. Then we go to the Java guys and ask them. And out next version of
> Perl will look like Java. Repeat this a few times, and you end up with a
> language noone uses. It now resembles something users of other languages
> like, but they already have said language, so they won't switch. But the
> people that used Perl in the first place (because Perl is what it is) no
> longer use it, because it's no longer Perl.
>
> Ask yourself. How much would PHP, Java, Python, whatever need to change to
> make you as a Perl programmer switch to that language? Would that language
> still be that language as it's now?
PHP has implementation of Perl's regular expression with the preg_* 
(PCRE) functions but that doesn't make make me like it more or less. I 
just know that when I'm in PHP-land I have a better option for regexp :-)

- di at log