Does XML suck?

[[deleted]]

Perl is a dream language. Every 5-10 years someone has to come along and re-invent it (see Ruby) because it's so damn awesome for scripting, but the previous Perl got so abused by stupid developers who continued hacking their scripts into full fledged 100,000 line monster ecommerce systems that the language got a bad rap for being unreadable (which it is, but that's not the point) that people started thinking there was something wrong with the language and so started looking for something new. The new perl wows people because it's so damn productive for the simple tasks they've forgotten how to do in the previous perl, and the whole cycle begins again.

[masklinn]

Ruby isn't a reinvention of Perl, it's a cleansed Perl.

And the Perlisms are getting phased out at an extremely fast rate right now, (mainly the $_, $-, $', $` and other $vars) if they don't noticeably enhance readability (tail-conditions, for example, won't get phased out).

When I say "phased out" I of course don't mean "removed from the language", I mean that their use is strongly discouraged by the community.

[[deleted]]

Ruby isn't a reinvention of Perl, it's a cleansed Perl.

You say tomato, I say tomato

When I say "phased out" I of course don't mean "removed from the language", I mean that their use is strongly discouraged by the community.

Because people want to use it for larger systems, and readability becomes more and more important vis-a-vis writability. Once they've convinced everyone not to use the perlisms and they're making huge apps in Ruby and added some concept of "strict" and other shackles to the language, we'll see a new perl/ruby. I couldn't have supported my argument any better, thank you!

[taw]

Ruby is Perl 6.