Amen brother. Started on Perl 4 on Sun BSD. Perl made me walk on water. Interest was so strong in the company we used to pay guys like Randal and Tom to come speak. I've bailed my employers out of countless binds with the well-timed perl script.
I totally agree with you that Perl 5 was the beginning of the end. It moved perl from the realm of the shell programmer to the domain of the academic. I remember the usenet posts of the time becoming focused on computer science language design goals like closures rather than real world problems. Yes, you can write OO programs in perl, if you remember all the details and you are very consistent in your style. But it requires too much expertise. It became too much of an investment.
Now, as you say, the train left the station while perl was deciding on its next destination. No way can I sell Perl to an employer now, despite the fact that it is often the quickest way out of a problem. Python is it, with its error prone indenting, inconsistent syntax, and bewildering (or lack of) type conversions.
Been fun venting.
The problem with TCL is that it is a single pass parser, not a normal
expression (recursive descent) parser like other languages.
This makes it the programmers job to worry about interpolation. A
real pain, getting all the evals right.
Just like shell programming, but then I work with people who love KSH, bash, etc.
I've never understood that masochistic behavior.
The most important attributes of a successful company are its leadership. The company must know where it is going and how it is going to get there. This means having an excellent management team, product managers, and software architects. Implementation, and your success, becomes a matter of execution, not of heroics.
We all like to fantasize about the breakthough products coming up from engineering. Sometimes that even happens. But in the real world it all about consistency. That means a team of good, solid all-arounders you can move around as your needs change.
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Amen brother. Started on Perl 4 on Sun BSD. Perl made me walk on water. Interest was so strong in the company we used to pay guys like Randal and Tom to come speak. I've bailed my employers out of countless binds with the well-timed perl script. I totally agree with you that Perl 5 was the beginning of the end. It moved perl from the realm of the shell programmer to the domain of the academic. I remember the usenet posts of the time becoming focused on computer science language design goals like closures rather than real world problems. Yes, you can write OO programs in perl, if you remember all the details and you are very consistent in your style. But it requires too much expertise. It became too much of an investment. Now, as you say, the train left the station while perl was deciding on its next destination. No way can I sell Perl to an employer now, despite the fact that it is often the quickest way out of a problem. Python is it, with its error prone indenting, inconsistent syntax, and bewildering (or lack of) type conversions. Been fun venting.
The problem with TCL is that it is a single pass parser, not a normal expression (recursive descent) parser like other languages. This makes it the programmers job to worry about interpolation. A real pain, getting all the evals right. Just like shell programming, but then I work with people who love KSH, bash, etc. I've never understood that masochistic behavior.
Relying superstars is a flawed strategy.
The most important attributes of a successful company are its leadership.
The company must know where it is going and how it is going to get there.
This means having an excellent management team, product managers, and
software architects. Implementation, and your success, becomes a matter
of execution, not of heroics.
We all like to fantasize about the breakthough products coming up from
engineering. Sometimes that even happens. But in the
real world it all about consistency. That means a team of good, solid
all-arounders you can move around as your needs change.