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> You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall. Yes, this is why it's nice. You don't have to worship at the foot of an industry which slavishly t
by peterwwillis 6y ago
> You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall.
Yes, this is why it's nice. You don't have to worship at the foot of an industry which slavishly tries to implement a misunderstanding of a system some dude made up 40 years ago to get around problems in other systems some other dudes made up before that. It's weird on purpose. And it's backwards-compatible-crufty on purpose.
Today I can run Perl code written two decades ago, but with the latest interpreter. I don't think any other interpreted language can do that, can they? (Bourne shell?)
- marksomnian 6y agoJavaScript probably can, or at least mostly. That's where a lot of its problems come from, historical baggage.
- btilly 6y agoJavaScript didn't exist 25 years ago. (The first version was released in September 1995, but wasn't JavaScript until Dec 4, 1995.)
- BruceEel 6y agoNot a Microsoft fan, but simple C / Windows API code from 25 years ago would likely compile and run on Windows 10 unchanged. My limited experience with Swift suggests that even 25 hours ago could be a tall order...
- anthk 6y agoEh, simple C code with X11/Motif will compile fine under Unix too.
- kazinator 6y agoMoreover, a Windows .exe compiled 25 years ago will also likely just run.
- jcranmer 6y ago25 years ago is 1995, and around the release of Windows 95, the first 32-bit version of Windows. A .exe compiled 25 years ago would probably be a 16-bit executable, and Windows stopped supporting Win16 code in Windows 7. WINE theoretically supports it, but 16-bit userspace code and a 64-bit kernel do not mix well.
- superdisk 6y agoI don't think that's true. The 32-bit versions of Windows still run 16-bit binaries.
- kazinator 6y ago> the first 32-bit version of Windows. Windows NT was released in July, 1993. Almost exactly two years before Windows 95. In 1997 I joined a company where I was doing Win32 coding, on a Windows NT code base that dated back to 1995. The code base also had parts targeting Windows CE client devices. (The company was an extremely early adopter of that platform; they might have done some of the development before CE was officially released in 1996. Anyway, that's another 32 bit Windows from almost 25 years ago, and less of a hack than 95.)
- forgotpwd16 6y agoJust run a 20 year old binary and worked fine; I'ld lie if I said it didn't impressed me
- anthk 6y agoTCL, but 7.x code may have flaws.