All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Larry Walls comments stir controversy

djberg96 on 2002-09-10T17:12:18

The comp.lang.ruby newsgroup is abuzz with the comments made by Larry Wall about the Ruby programming language. The thread is well over 100 messages strong by now, and has naturally degenerated into topics like, "+ vs . as a string concatenation operator", as though that were a highly important issue or something.

I'm sick of seeing messages pop up about it in the mailing list now. So today I sent a reply that contained just one word - "Hitler". Think that will kill the thread?

Good luck

jjohn on 2002-09-10T18:28:25

"Hilter" or "Nazi" is the ISO/ANSI standard way to kill a usenet thread. Let's hope a.l.r is has standards compliant posters. :-) I thought Larry was fairly complementary about Ruby. He was a little harsh (although completely accurate) about PHP inadequate extension mechanism. Still watching the tail lights of other languages isn't the road to innovation.

Re:Good luck

petdance on 2002-09-10T18:34:17

And he's entirely accurate about PHP's awful extension mechanism. Having to rebuild PHP to incorporate new functionality is a suboptimal solution.

Re:Good luck

pdcawley on 2002-09-10T19:11:33

Well, it was good enough for Perl up until version 4. For values of 'good enough' that include 'Hey, at least it's possible.'

Re:Good luck

jordan on 2002-09-12T13:31:41

  • Well, it was good enough for Perl up until version 4. For values of 'good enough' that include 'Hey, at least it's possible.'

"Good enough" in this case is just bad. The rapid expansion of a huge base of useable extensions for Perl started with Perl 5.

This experience is enough to place the PHP mechanism clearly and firmly in the bad category, from a relative perspective.

When you think about it, can you really imagine an Open Source language that wouldn't support extension through rebuilding? It's "good enough" in the same sense that "absolute minimum requirement" is good enough.