Slashdot Mirror
The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership
Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."
Why not keep both on as president? That way there would always be more than one way to get something done... I'm sure that never leads to problems. /who let this python guy in the room?
Other than for products (or news aggregating websites) that were originally coded in Perl is there any reason to start a project today in Perl instead of any of the more modern scripting languages?
This is not a rhetorical question (or in Slashdot: I am not trolling). I would actually like to know why developers would choose Perl over alternatives today on a new project.
Multi-dispatch, junctions, roles, rules and grammars, a much improved VM, asynchronous IO, working threads, an event system, continuations and coroutines, optional typing and type inferencing, an immensely improved FFI, interoperability with other languages including Perl 5, an improved object system, hyperoperators, unification of blocks and closures, properties, object-like built-ins, improved reflection and introspection, improved consistency, improved clarity, and improved distribution possibilities.
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80% catch up? I think your math is off.
Catch up:
Revolutionary (items in parentheses explain why some "common" features are included here):
(Before you criticize those things I put in the revolutionary list, you'd have to take the time to read up on them and realize why I put them there rather than just assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. I've programmed in many languages and I have a very good idea of what's common and what's not -- though perhaps I'm just smoking crack.)
Of course, I could make similar comments as yours about Java (I don't know C++ well). Java languished for a long time without regular expressions. Autoboxing in Tiger was an attempt to get around some of the difficulties inherent in typing the container. The latest Dr. Dobb's has an interesting article about functional programming in Java -- something many other programs have allowed for years. Of course, Java still doesn't have closures (that's sooooo 1980's and interfaces were a neat idea which introduced a different set of problems for the ones they solved). Further, Java's decision to type the containers instead of the data means they must focus more on class types than class capabilities, thereby eliminating many of the benefits of allomorphism. And not even get into how ridiculously verbose the language is. I don't play "Perl golf". I take the time to write out clear code. It's still far shorter than equivalent code in Java.
Mind you, just because I list these issues with Java does not mean that I think it's a bad language. On the contrary: I happen to like Java. I sometimes program in it and just as Perl has some benefits over Java, the reverse is often true. Java and Perl are both crazy but Perl is my type of crazy.