A few days ago Joel Spolsky posted an article called Language Wars in which he was pretty unequivocal in his opinion on Perl:
an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl)
Yesterday he launched a new jobs board. And what's that we see in the photo at the top of that page? Looks to me a lot like a pile of Perl books :-)
The "Do as I say, not as I do" mentality isn't limited to just politicians and high-profile televangelists. Though, to be fair, we should consider that it probably isn't his desk.
It's also worth noting that his ultimate solution in that blog post boils down to an in-house home-brewed language. And, it gets better: it's a dialect of basic that compiles down to VBScript (among other choices). Having had to contort to deal with vendor services written in VB and/or VBScript (*cough*Fandango.com*cough*), I wouldn't be bragging about that. Certainly not on any blog that gets indexed by Google.
Re:Just goes to show...
Aristotle on 2006-09-06T23:21:45
His compile-down choice makes sense in his context. He isn’t writing an app that will run on his own servers, he’s writing shrinkwrap software that customers buy and install on their own computers, even though it happens to have a web-based frontend.
Plus, the decision to write that compiler was made because he had a large existing codebase written in pre-.NET VBScript. He needed to future-proof it for the
.NET platform and also wanted to target customers on non-MSFT platforms. Between rewriting a large codebase from scratch in another language and writing a custom in-house compiler that emits code for the targetted languages, the latter is by far the better option. So that bit is perfectly sensible. It’s all the stuff that comes before that’s utter garbage.
