Slashdot Mirror
Perl And Standards: Larry Rosler Interview
Kaufmann writes: "In this interview with Joe Johnston (on O'Reilly's Perl.com), Larry Rosler (of HP, one of the people who helped put the 'ANSI' in 'ANSI C') shares his thoughts and advice on the value of standards, optimising Perl code, how Sun should handle Java, and programming in general. Will we ever see a Perl Language Subcommittee too?"
The OO paradigm promised to save the world of software engineering from bugs, complexity, and maintenance difficulties, but if the last 5 or 6 years are to be considered as indicators for future performance, it's not worth the hype.
Think of it in terms of economics. People will write the most complex and featureful software they can that stays within the level of buggyness they can tolerate. Therefore, buggyness will tend to stay constant.
Software is just as buggy now as it was 5 or 6 years ago, but is far more complex. I have personal experience with what can be done with OO to facilitate large complex systems which would be unthinkable without it.
Therefore, people have taken advantage of the ability of OO to manage complexity and pushed the envelope with it. I don't consider this a bad thing.
In addition, while I know Perl well and like it a lot, I would not dare use it for a large complex project.
pornking
According to this a group of hardy hackers are hard at work on a complete, from scratch, re-implementation of perl in C++. This reimplementation is supposed to be completely compatible with perl5. How can you guarantee compatibility without a specification? My guess is, in the same way that perl5 broke some obscure perl4 scripts, perl6 will break perl5 scripts - but without a spec, it's impossible to tell which of those breakages are bugs and which are features!
This is a completely stupid overgeneralization. VB is great at rapid prototyping of visual apps, and Perl sucks big at it.
Jason