Re^2: A Melancholy Monkday

[sundialsvc4]

It has always baffled me why JavaScript, of all languages that could have “won the war” (on that particular battlefield), turned out to be the one that did so ... and that it did so essentially by-default.   It is a perfectly egregious language, devoid of strong-typing and many other things, which is why whenever possible I use one of the newer “cross-platform” languages (specifically:   haXe ...), which can generate JavaScript as one of its several so-called “targets.”   (The image on that front-page really says it all.)

Somehow, though, I just don’t see Perl having its proper place in a scenario like the one you describe, Kevin.   It’s just not what I think of Perl as being “for.”   So it’s like using a wrench to drive a nail ... we’ve all done it, and maybe we have a few bandages to show for it, but it’s just not the scenario where this language was meant to shine, and where it does shine.   All of us need to rip-apart text files, to build elaborate data-structures and forget about ’em, to use regular expressions and high-performance hash tables, and ... to use CPAN.

CPAN, really, is where it’s all at, anyway.   The perl executable on my machine is tiny; the php executable (which compiles everything in at build-time) is many megabytes in size.   Yet the composite content of CPAN, inclusive of its many dynamically-loaded modules, is larger still ... if, when, and as-needed.   (And, to make useful use of Perl on a client, you’d have to install these same big things ...   Perl would be very uncomfortable there, and it wouldn’t really out-shine the neighbors.)

A “popularity contest,” even if the statistical methods used are sensible and really appropriate to the occasion (vs. the simple selling of magazines ...), is for the most part just a measure of fashion, and/or of what subjects a harried business school or college figures can be stuffed into a degree-program that will sell.   When you have many tons of freight to move, and someone paying you to move it, you need ... a locomotive.

“Programming languages:   always learn another one.   Just because.”