4 ms·

> The overall trend is Perl died everywhere. Far from the truth, Perl is everywhere, what died is the hype.

derefr 13y ago
If the life of a language can be measured in how many people are learning it for any reason other than to maintain an existing code base written in it (an arbitrary definition, but I think a common one), then Perl is roughly dead-as-a-doornail, in precisely the same sense as, say, COBOL is dead. (Note that under this definition, FORTRAN isn't dead—people still write new code in it, every once in a while, due to its mathematics libraries. Perl is "more dead than FORTRAN.")
- kbenson 13y ago
  Are you talking about new people learning language, as you state, or people writing new code in a language, as your example implies? Without revision to clarify your point, it looks somewhat like you had a statement you wanted to make (Perl is "more dead than FORTRAN.") and had to reach for some assertions to support it.
  - derefr 13y ago
    The intersection of the two sets: new people learning the language, who are learning the language in order to write new code in the language. New people learn COBOL still, but they only do that if-and-when someone with an existing COBOL codebase has a problem with it, for which they're willing to hire and train up new programmers in COBOL. For example, banks who needed their batch-processing code updated for Y2K-compliance trained a good few people in COBOL. But they weren't learning COBOL wIth the intent of writing new code in the language—just with the intent of maintaining old code. Effectively, they were treating the COBOL codebase as a Ball of Mud (http://laputan.org/mud/ http://laputan.org/mud/), where old components could be patched, but any new component should be written for a living platform, communicating with the Ball of Mud over an API instead of being sucked into it. I'm asserting, here, that Perl is such a language—that the only reason new people learn Perl is to maintain a Ball of Mud written in Perl. From there, they may go on to become productive Perl programmers—but because they were only "born" into the Perl community because some company who had Perl-ers lost them and needed new ones, the language's adoption rate is effectively "below replacement," like a birth rate below 2.0. In living languages, at least some people will learn the language on their own, because they think it will be useful for some task they'd like to accomplish. Perl is not one of these languages. Under this definition, other dead languages include sh-derivative shell scripting (people only learn it because shell scripts that already exist must be modified), and anything to do with SOAP (it was stillborn; people only ever learned about it to deal with codebases that used it. Then, horrifyingly, they ended up creating more of those codebases.)

If the life of a language can be measured in how many people are learning it for any reason other than to maintain an existing code base written in it (an arbitrary definition, but I think a common one), then Perl is roughly dead-as-a-doornail, in precisely the same sense as, say, COBOL is dead. (Note that under this definition, FORTRAN isn't dead—people still write new code in it, every once in a while, due to its mathematics libraries. Perl is "more dead than FORTRAN.")

kbenson 13y ago
Are you talking about new people learning language, as you state, or people writing new code in a language, as your example implies? Without revision to clarify your point, it looks somewhat like you had a statement you wanted to make (Perl is "more dead than FORTRAN.") and had to reach for some assertions to support it.
- derefr 13y ago
  The intersection of the two sets: new people learning the language, who are learning the language in order to write new code in the language. New people learn COBOL still, but they only do that if-and-when someone with an existing COBOL codebase has a problem with it, for which they're willing to hire and train up new programmers in COBOL. For example, banks who needed their batch-processing code updated for Y2K-compliance trained a good few people in COBOL. But they weren't learning COBOL wIth the intent of writing new code in the language—just with the intent of maintaining old code. Effectively, they were treating the COBOL codebase as a Ball of Mud (http://laputan.org/mud/ http://laputan.org/mud/), where old components could be patched, but any new component should be written for a living platform, communicating with the Ball of Mud over an API instead of being sucked into it. I'm asserting, here, that Perl is such a language—that the only reason new people learn Perl is to maintain a Ball of Mud written in Perl. From there, they may go on to become productive Perl programmers—but because they were only "born" into the Perl community because some company who had Perl-ers lost them and needed new ones, the language's adoption rate is effectively "below replacement," like a birth rate below 2.0. In living languages, at least some people will learn the language on their own, because they think it will be useful for some task they'd like to accomplish. Perl is not one of these languages. Under this definition, other dead languages include sh-derivative shell scripting (people only learn it because shell scripts that already exist must be modified), and anything to do with SOAP (it was stillborn; people only ever learned about it to deal with codebases that used it. Then, horrifyingly, they ended up creating more of those codebases.)