| Amo, amas, amat |
[Mar. 13th, 2007|11:54 am] |
Here's a thought that struck me the other day: Latin, like Sumerian before it, endured as a scholarly and priestly language for hundreds of years after people stopped speaking it as an everyday tongue. Will English go the same way? Will the people of 2500 (or even later) be forced to learn this weird language, full of exceptions to rules and superfluous vocabulary, in order to do science and business internationally (or even interplanetarily)? Or is English's place in the sun only a brief flicker, like the dominance German enjoyed over science in the late 19th and early 20th century? And if so, what will replace it? The two leading candidates are Chinese and Hindi, I'd imagine... |
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| Ten things I hate about Perl |
[Mar. 13th, 2007|01:08 pm] |
brian d. foy says that you can't be an effective advocate for a language unless you can think of five things that you hate about it off the top of your head, the reason being that if you can't, then you don't know enough about the language to advocate it effectively. So, just to go one (or five) better, here are ( ten things I hate about Perl )
This is not to say that I hate Perl: far from it. I think it's a wonderful, fun language, with a great community around it, producing some insanely cool software (CPAN might be considered the world's premier laboratory for module and language-extension design). I am continually surprised that Perl has such a bad press, and gets such short shrift from the language-design community. You might expect that a language that breaks almost every accepted precept of language design would simply be a bad language, and no fun at all to use. Yet Perl does this, and has a fanatical community of users, some of them truly excellent hackers. This, it seems to me, is a datum point of enormous importance.
But anyway, I'd like to ask this question to the hackers reading this. What five things do you hate most about your favourite language?
* Unless you've set $[ to 1 - thanks, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) paddy3118! |
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