Comment by aryastark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aryastark | Hacker News Reader

The problem Perl has is that it is the language tied to the first dot-com crash. Prior to the dot-com crash, there was the AI Winter. This is where Lisp died, for almost identical reasons. When a major tragedy happens, someone or something has to take the fall.

SV needs to continually reinvent itself, so that VCs can sell their smelly IPOs on Wall St. They needed a new paradigm, so we got Web 2.0. Enter PHP. What is PHP? It's pretty much Perl. In fact, it is Perl. Just a highly shit version, done by monkeys that don't have a clue. Perl 2.0. Facebook, the shining star of Web 2.0, is built on it.

But Web 2.0 isn't new, either. The story of Web 2.0 is how advertising prevailed over technology. Now we're entering a mobile post-web period, where we go back to proprietary lock-in with a cloud twist. It's the 1980s again. But it's fresh on Wall St. Better start learning Objective C. If you believe Android will remain relevant (I personally do not) then keep those Java skills dusted off.

This is the first time I have seen anyone blame perl for the dot-com crash.

Disclosure: My first and 3rd jobs were slinging perl for dot-coms, one of whom is a still leader in Web 2.0 or Web 3 or whatever we are on now.

PHP is mostly a web templating system, never had much of command-line presence. Perl always did.

I don't think you know what you are talking about.

> The problem Perl has is that it is the language tied to the first dot-com crash. Prior to the dot-com crash, there was the AI Winter. This is where Lisp died, for almost identical reasons. When a major tragedy happens, someone or something has to take the fall.

I hate Perl because of its syntax but I have to be thankful to Perl because it made Matz start Ruby.

That said, your statement doesn't compute: What does Perl has to do with the dot-com crash?!

To me it sounds like a distortion of the truth: Perl was instrumental in spurring the modern dynamic language movement, but it in itself is all but dead. Perl (and I mean Perl5) is antiquated, and no modern shop I'm aware of uses it. There are always exceptions, but I don't see a lot of job postings looking for Perl programmers. Ruby, Python, et al, sure.

Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6. There were some attempts, and you can argue about their success, but the fact that there is no reference implementation is what killed Perl. The Perl community argued and thrashed and screamed about Perl 6, and meanwhile, Python and Ruby developed vibrant communities, and most serious Perl programmers I know simply migrated to one of the new, more developed languages.

I suppose what this guy is really saying is that Perl 5 died around the time of the dot-com bust. But correlation does not equal causation; Perl killed itself.

"Perl (and I mean Perl5) is antiquated, and no modern shop I'm aware of uses it."

30 seconds of Googling puts this fallacy entirely to bed:

http://perl.la/ http://www.perl.com/pub/2014/02/perl-today-february-2014.htm... http://moose.iinteractive.com/about.html

> Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6.

I don't agree that Perl is all but dead, but I agree that one of the bigger contributors to the length of P6's 15 year gestation is quite plausibly Larry holding his tongue and commits in relation to compiler implementation.

Fwiw:

* According to Larry (a couple weeks ago) the community told him to stay out of compiler implementation at the start of the P6 project. He complied, constraining his P6 toolchain coding to pieces such as the STD grammar/parser.

* Late last year Larry said he planned to change that, with his main focus set to be optimizations. And in the last few weeks he has indeed begun landing a stream of commits to Rakudo and MoarVM. (So far his commits mostly relate to Unicode handling, which looks set to be a notable P6 strength, but there have been some significant optimizations too.)

* There is a de facto reference implementation: Rakudo/MoarVM.

Why is it that you see Android becoming irrelevant? And when do you see this happening by?

Google has a Samsung problem. I think they are in a bad position, such as Sun was with Java or IBM with the PC. They own the platform, but they aren't getting much from it that I can tell. I'm no psychic. But I can easily see Google dropping Android in a few years or Samsung forking it. Won't be good for developers or users.

Android is the new Symbian/J2ME. 7 years ago Symbian looked unstoppable, but look at it now. The same will eventually happen to Android, especially if Google continues down its current path of forced integration with Google+.

One thing that's interesting in this context is the Firefox phone and its 100% FOSS web tech stack. I've seen projections of an additional 400 million smart phone users this year and maybe another 600 million in 2015. It seems plausible that Firefox phones will reach 10% of new smartphones by the end of 2015; if that happens I think it's highly likely that the game will change again.

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