On Fri, 7 Jun 2013, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
David Lang wrote:
Perl use may or may not be declining (depending on how you measure it), but
are you really willing to take on the task of re-writing everything that's
in Perl into another language and force all developers of scripts to learn
that other language? what's the ROI of this?
Let's not talk hypotheticals. git-svn.perl (+ perl/SVN/*.pl) is
absolutely massive. It's an incredibly useful tool in that it
actually works, and that there is nothing replacing it in the
foreseeable future. This monster was written almost entirely by one
brilliant person, and nobody is going to rewrite it. We don't start a
huge discussion about what languages are "approved" before accepting
such a contribution: if the contributor wants to write something in a
dominant language (Perl in this case), and it's going to be useful, we
merge it. End of story.
Well, Felipe is saying that Perl is dieing and we should re-write everything
that exists in Perl to Ruby.
Part of the reason for the discussion now is because not having similar
discussions in the past have caused problems.
All this planning is a colossal waste of time, in my opinion.
Perl isn't going to disappear any time soon. What makes you think that
whatever language you pick to replace Perl is going to be more stable than
Perl is?
Why are we discussing something that is indeterminate? It is
impossible to foresee the future, but that is no reason to freeze
_present_ development.
and it's not a reason to throw away existing stuff based on the argument that
Perl is dieing
There have been a very large number of scripting languages show up, make a
lot of press, and then fade in favor of other languages while Perl has
continued. It's not the sexy languange nowdays, but it's there, reliable,
and used so heavily that there's really no chance of it dissapearing in the
forseable future.
Nobody claimed that "press coverage" is a good metric. We can only
talk about facts, and Felipe already showed you a TIOBE index graph.
If you have overwhelming _evidence_ that Ruby is a weak language that
will die soon, share it: otherwise, I see no value in this discussion.
TIOBE index graph is "press coverage" as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not saying that Ruby in particular has a fatal flaw, I'm just questioning
the "Perl is dead, re-write everything in Ruby" mantra.
The language that you choose to use when writing a new application is related to
things related to that type of application.
Ruby is not an extremely common language for sysadmins to use.
Perl remains a common language for these sorts of tasks, even if it's not used
for user visible applications.
Arguing that Perl is dieing, we need to abandon it is just wrong.
David Lang
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