Repeating a reply I posted over at http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/01/08/angry-perl-users :
Update: I don't think I did leave this comment there. After losing it the first time and then retyping it, every indication is that the submit isn't going. Dammit... sometimes I really, really hate JavaScript.
Hi David,
I found this searching summize.com for Perl. I try to answer people's Perl questions and clarify things for them, and do so without descending into advocacy. I used to be a fierce Amiga advocate -- we were a legendary breed. Commodore died anyway, and after some time, I realized that that had everything to do with Commodore screwing up and nothing to do with people giving them free advertising.
http://use.perl.org/user/Ovid/journal/38010 -- Ovid, a very well known name in Perl circles with many years of service to the community under his belt, agrees and presents other numbers plotting Perl's declines.
http://chainsawblues.vox.com/library/post/why-i-use-perl-and-still-hate-dynamic-language-weenies-too.html -- Matt Trout, another extremely well known name in Perl circles with countless important modules and talks under his belt talks about the benefits of not having so many fanboys in the community as other more popular languages. Whether he's right that Perl has fewer, he's a community leader who doesn't want these guys around.
Larry Wall has been quoted as saying "there's nothing in this world worth being a snot over".
The message is pretty clear... if you're trying to defend your favorite language from perceived attacks, you're not making yourself useful. If you're creating things people want or helping to do so, then much more likely, you are useful.
Not to shift blame, but talking about language popularity, you're going to attract these sorts. Regardless, I wanted to go on record as renouncing these idiot tactics.
As you said, Ruby is having some growing pains. I sincerely wish Ruby the best. Java came out as a model of cleanliness but then pressure mounted for such things as autoboxing and generics, and the internal architecture started to creak a bit. Tcl had serious growing pains moving from "everything is a string" to "some things are numbers" in its internal representation which peeked through to its syntax. Perl had serious growing pains growing from a better sed+awk+bash into an OO-ish (if you squint just right) language with closures and other fun stuff. Each language has its own story and they're all a hell of a lot more interesting than trying to quantify it down into a continuum of good/bad sucks/rules.
Data is fun to play with, and I hope you continue to enjoy playing with it despite the frothing.
Cheers,
-scott
It's far easier to defend a language when awesome stuff exists for it... Especially awesome stuff that people don't expect to exist or be possible, or that breaks with traditional views of things.
