On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:01:55 -0600 Jason Clinton [email protected] wrote:
Well, famous quotes are dime-a-dozen but this one comes from Alan Kay, the inventor of SmallTalk and quite possibly one of the more brilliant people alive in Computer Science, today:
"Like I said, it___s a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn___t have to have any particular musical merits. I think a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditious gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn___t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years."[1]
Not to say that a nice bang-up language isn't useful every now-and-then but it's hardly a reason to throw C away.
And before you flame Alan, he also said later in the interview that he didn't know anyone alive that knew how to design a good programming language.
[1] http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273&...
The whole interview is a great read.
I'm sure he's a smart guy, but I disagree with this quote. Yes Perl was originally designed to fill a short term need. However, I really don't see how it is now a "long term problem".
Yes, there are nasty spaghetti Perl applications out there, but this is a problem with the developers, not with Perl itself.
Also, I wasn't saying to throw away C. I just hate it when people make Perl ( and most other scripting languages ) out to be so much slower than a compiled app. In all honesty the difference these days is so small it's difficult to detect in properly written programs.
--------------------------------- Frank Wiles [email protected] http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------