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Comment by memracom | Hacker News Reader

And that is precisely what Tim is saying. He happens to work mostly with the new tool named Go but he does recognize that there are others like Rust and Dart that are also trying to do things better.

But we need to actually move away from using bad tools (and this has happened with PERL) and start using the newer, better tools more often. Every software developer should learn some Erlang (or Elixir), some Clojure, some Go, etc.

If you don't try these tools out and kick the tires for a while, then you end up stuck in the past like all those COBOL programmers.

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Oh god. It's Perl. And no need to drag it through the mud here. It's pretty much the only language that gets Unicode right. It has nothing in common with the abject misery that is PHP. Perl came out in '87. Erlang came out in '86. I don't know what you're high on, other than trends and trendwhores.

Clojure isn't new. Not to take a dig at Rich Hickey, but everything he is doing with immutable objects was done more than a decade ago by the likes of Henry Baker (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html). Of course, everything that has ever been tried at all has been tried in some variant of Lisp/Scheme at one point in time.

Stop while you're behind. Nobody believes that Henry Baker's papers are equal to what Rich Hickey has done with immutable objects. Geez, get a grip on reality man.

I might be wrong, but COBOL isn't being actively developed as a language anymore .. PHP however is still solving problems and under constant development and improving all the time.

> PHP however is still solving problems

But is it solving more problems than it creates?

PHP is great for developers and firms because they are always required to stay and make sure things blow up. Most of the PHP I've worked with was also very hard to decipher by anyone except the original developer.

Hi memracom,

Where will Perl 6 sit when/if it becomes something you could realistically use? Would you classify it as one of the bad tools or a newer, better one?

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