Re: In praise of Perl's object system.

[sundialsvc4]

It is also worth keeping in mind that “Perl has a history.”   It has been around for quite some time now, and there are (believe it or not...) many millions of lines of “mission-critical” (Perl-5) source code in service right now.   Therefore, anything that Perl does, today, must keep one foot firmly in the future and one foot firmly in the present.

It doesn’t take much for (say...) an academic-person to try to change the world by inventing a “new and improved” language.   Hell, IBM tried to do that in 1964 with PL/1.   It was a very serious effort that is still (of course...) in service today, but it didn’t do what it was really intended to do.   It didn’t displace FORTRAN, and it didn’t displace COBOL, either.   When you have invested millions of dollars into millions of lines of source-code that works, no amount of “new and improved” is ever going to persuade the accountants ... or the stockholders.

Perl’s object-system, therefore, has “pressing engineering constraints.”   And-d-d-d, Perl being Perl, Perl has risen admirably to the occasion!   The object-features of Perl-5 are efficient and fast, and packages like Moose clearly demonstrate just how far it can be pushed.

Language implementors, of course, never rest on their laurels.   PL/1 remains quite viable.   Perl is in the process of evolving a whole new manifestation of itself.   And we even have ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.

And... folks are making money for their companies using all of these technologies.   And they are managing to do that without rewriting all of the code that was written before (as earnestly as they might want to do so!).

And... maybe... that is what really matters most.