good chemistry is complicated, and a little bit messy -LW |
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Living-ness of programming languagesby dragonchild (Archbishop) |
on May 21, 2004 at 14:27 UTC ( [id://355283]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Wassercrats, in Fearing the demise of Perl, brings up a very interesting concept - the comparative living-ness of various programming languages, at least where the Internet is concerned. While I disagree with his jumped-to conclusion, I would put forward that he has stumbled on a useful measure of a language.
In my reply, I defined living-ness to be a composite measure of the following qualities:
In his reply, Abigail-II takes the concept a little further and compares 20 languages. The numbers he comes up with track very closely to what I would consider how those 20 languages are doing, living-wise.
Note - living-ness and useful-ness are two mostly-unrelated concepts. But, I think that it is foolish to disregard either concept in favor of the other. Many have said that LISP is the be-all-end-all of programming languages. Yet, the likelihood of gettting a job programming in LISP is ... low. As professionals, we need to take all these factors into account. Even though I consider Perl to be one of the best languages in existence, I'm still open to learning Java, Python, PHP, and even Fortran, if need be. (Need has not yet arisen, but it might!) ------
Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested
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