Developer Spotlight: Damian Conway

An anonymous reader writes "Builder AU interview Perl guru Damian Conway to talk about Perl 6, his reasons for choosing Perl over other languages, PHP, Model-driven development and the first Open Source Developers Conference held this week in Melbourne, Australia."

Comments

Perl Vs. Java

[justanyone]

From the Article:

why not say, Java?
Leaving aside the uniqueness of the Perl community, from a purely technical perspective Java is far too restrictive for the kind of work I do. And it's far too demanding on the programmer. Sure, it has a lot of great libraries that make it easy to get particular things done, but I didn't want to do those particular things. And certainly not in the ways Java would require me to do them.

This makes a wonderful point about Perl "There's More Than One Way To Do It" == TMTOWTDI. This is good and bad (like most powerful tools) in that writing hard-to-read code is certainly easy. However, the loose-type is great for projects that don't really need to differentiate between long and integer and float. Hey, it's a number, that's good enough. We read it in, we do stuff with it, we write it out. If it doesn't break when we get a different type coming through than we expected, great.

Yes, Java is demanding. I don't mind demanding. I do mind it being private. And, Java isn't open source. Perl is by nature open source - you CAN'T hide the source if you distribute code to someone. That's the beauty of it.

Re:Language agnosticism needs to be preached more.

[A beautiful mind]

Perl stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language"
How is this NOT an acronym? Not to nitpick, but to correct. Your statement about the differences between Perl vs. perl is correct.