In the middle of a "Joel on Software" article about How Microsoft Lost the API War is an interesting assertion:
Whenever you hear someone bragging about how productive their language is, they're probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory management, even if they misattribute it.
I think that this applies very much to Perl. The productivity not the bragging.
That implies that all languages with automatic memory management are equal. And if you program in more than one, you would still have an opinion on how much more productive you are in one or the other.. take Perl and Python, for instance. Or even Java.
I think that is too simplistic a view, possibly. Automated memory management is one of a (mid sized) laundry list of features that one should (or could) use to decide on suitability and productivity. You get minus points for some classes of tasks (managing memory when you want to focus on grepping and bulk renaming an arbitrary list of files is a minus mark). In the same way, that same aspect could be positive (for an embedded system, managing memory is key. I'd take C or C++ over Perl/Java/Python and friends, simply for the greater control over memory allocation).
Re:but ... but ..
TorgoX on 2004-06-18T04:34:36
That implies that all languages with automatic memory management are equal.No it doesn't! LIES ALL LIES!
