My home node says my beliefs about criticism, and this rant just went into the list of links I keep there. Perl is not and never should be all things to all people. Indeed anything that sincerely tries will fail. And some of your points I have said before and will again, for instance in Re: FS OS sysprog I pointed out that Perl is bad for kernel programming.

I do disagree on some things though. Linux is not actually a bad fit for a lot of the embedded market. Sure, at the very bottom end it doesn't make sense. But betting against it is IMO betting against Moore, and Moore has a few years yet to run. Plus as soon as you want an embedded device that is able to network using standard protocols, you won't wind up with requirements much below Linux' and guess which is less work?

As for memory mapped devices, it is possible in theory but the same hiding of details that makes Perl so easy to develop in makes it hard. OTOH take a look at IPC::Shareable and you see that Perl can be taught to be careful with what it does after all.

There is just one point I would like to wind up with. And that is that there is a very good reason that Perl doesn't work like a lot of other languages. Most people who think about maintainability start with the idea that they are going to keep a large project under control. In saying that they have already lost sight of the fact that the act of keeping something short and sweet makes it easier to maintain. Perl is a master of that school of design.

In order to be that, Perl goes out of its way to be expressive, emulates a way of thinking that people find natural, concentrates on simplicity of interfaces to a relatively small number of important concepts, and in general finds reason to break most of the classical CS rules. But in the end it works! The classical CS people are right that you wouldn't want to maintain many Perl programs with 30K lines. OTOH what takes 30K in C will take an order of magnitude less in Perl - with better debugging information yet!

Not to mention fewer buffer overflows...

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