Monday, August 5, 2013

Yegge on Perl

Steve Yegge always makes you think, even when he's doing something so preposterous as challenging the One True Language.

not that he's wrong

What?!?

Yeah, I have to admit he's right. Perl is a convenient place to start with a lot of problems because as glue for CPAN it really gets you close to a quick solution for nearly anything on Earth. But ultimately I think we're going to find that any one programming language is simply not going to be sufficient for every need. That, after all, is the entire point of this very blog. So even though I have a kneejerk negative reaction to any criticism of Perl, my language of choice these past ten years or so, he's still right. Perl is an antique.

I just happen to like antiques.

And honestly, seeing the Perl expression of any idea as merely the cave-wall projection of the actual program, I have to say that starting out in Perl isn't such a bad way to start approaching a problem. It's just that I find myself drifting off the rails to language design fairly quickly in the course of any given larger project.

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