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Because it's a powerful language and during the dot com boom was used by a lot of very poor programmers. Rails is running into the same problem with overuse/ab
by mst 17y ago
Because it's a powerful language and during the dot com boom was used by a lot of very poor programmers.
Rails is running into the same problem with overuse/abuse of monkey patching, method_missing etc. that perl ran into with overuse/abuse of rich syntax.
It's sad. But it's really nothing to do with either language. They just handed a large chunk of power to a developer community that grew too large too fast for most of the membership to have learned how to use that power responsibly.
- pellicle 17y agoSo, do you think the key to Perl 6's success is to avoid that? That is, do you think it's better for Perl 6 to have a smaller, more seasoned developer community in the beginning (to establish some best-practices before the rest of us join in)?
- chromatic 17y agoUnless you manage to pull every novice, dabbler, and new developer into the community and teach those best practices from the start, you won't solve the problem on a large scale. Programming -- especially the realm of informal, ad hoc programming so well served by dynamic languages -- rewards individual exploration. You don't have to write elegant Python or Ruby or PHP or Perl to get your job done, and you don't have to learn a lot of theory to accomplish a task. You may make a mess, but it's not clear that novices care about that. Why should they? Perl 6 has an advantage in that most of the tutorials and examples aren't full of bad examples and muddled thinking like most of the Perl 5 tutorials and examples are. I don't expect that to last, but hopefully some thoughtful language design will make abusing the language much more difficult.
- Kaizyn 17y agoNo, the key to Perl 6's success is to convince all of the Perl 5 developers to move on to the new language. Also, if they (the Perl coders) go on a binge and port all the CPAN libraries over to Perl 6, that will help.