I also said “If you have invested 10 years in Perl or Lisp, you have a vested interest in defending it and you cannot be objective.” So I cannot expect you to be objective. I visited your blog and your header says “Perl programming, Open Source …”. The first article I see is “Why do people dislike Perl?

The title of my article is “If you have to learn just one programming language”. Now, I am quite positive that if you do a formal or informal survey you are not going to find people picking or suggesting Perl as the language to learn — unless your day job requires it. You have admitted “I’m not even arguing Perl is the language you should have chosen”

I mentioned in the article

“All criteria except #10 are objective and measurable. #10 is to some extent subjective and therefore my bias will be reflected in the choice of language.”

The thing that hurts Perl fanboys the most is when you tell them that their language is line-noise. I can understand that. So let me retract it and say that “Bad coders can write line noise in any language. If you follow good Perl practice you can indeed write beautiful and maintainable code in Perl”. Having said that, based on all the criteria that I selected, I would still eliminiate Perl — without, I hope, offending perlophiles.

BTW, if I want to sing Perl’s praises I will pick something other than BBC’s iPlayer. You can read all about it via google search.

Patrick Michaud, the Rakudo Compiler Pumpking, has just announced that Perl 6 will be released in Spring 2010. It will not be complete, but it will be usable and useful. After all, people will only start using Perl 6 when it is “complete” (whatever that is – when will Perl 5 be complete?)

Don’t believe it’s FUD? Why are the likes of the BBC using it for something as important (and newly developed) as the iPlayer? Why is it trivial to find Perl (application) developer job postings from startups and established companies alike in many locations throughout the world? Are all these companies deliberatly looking to write obfuscated code?

(And I haven’t said a thing about the vibrant community, recent developments such as Moose, which other languages are beginning to copy, strong testing culture that pre-dates even Java, etc, etc).

Ultimiately, these sorts of discussions are purely subjective. If you think you can objectively choose the best overall language, you’re sadly misguided. I don’t think that’s what you were trying to do here, and I’m not even arguing Perl is the language you should have chosen, but at the very least, you could try to get your facts rights about the languages you’re discussing, instead of just repeating factoids that are easy to disprove.

I’ll give you all the other negatives about Perl, and Perl 6, but that last bit of speculation is pretty blind, in this age of clearly visible software repositories.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/compare.....akudo+Perl

That’s the activity of “Perl 6″ (Parrot + Rakudo) over the last years (That doesn’t include the pugs repo).

I stand by what I said (good and bad) about Perl. No one can deny that the delay in releasing Perl6 has hurt it. Ironically, it gave a mini boost to Haskell as Audrey Tang used it to implement Perl6.

Ruby and its author Matz were not known outside Japan until DHH unleashed RAILS and created a huge interest in Ruby. Python has benefited from Google’s embrace of it and that Guido works for Google. The rise in popularity of these 2 languages has had a negative impact on Perl.

As for Perl 6, is started after Python 3 and Python 3 was released not long ago. Parrot virtual machine is already at version 1.1. Perl 6 has regular releases – you can try it now, it has many libraries already. Wiki “November” is written in Perl 6.

My favorite quote: “Amusing result for people who like bashing my favourite language… when i google for “Weird perl problem”, i get back 1,880,000 results… could be bad… except that ruby (2,000,000), python (2,030,000) and php (3,490,000) seem to be doing worse. perl may have weird bits in it, but it seems to have less than the competition… ” (c) ddick

Please take a look at HAXE http://haxe.org a “multiplatform language”. You can target javascript, php, as3, C++, NekoVM.

Good luck with your adventures in Scala and Lift – hope to see you on the mailing list some time soon.

There is no off-by-one bug in my code. Many people don’t realize that if you get back 1.5 times the money (say $1) you wagered, then $1 of that is your own money and you are ahead by only 50 cents and not 1.5. If you wager 1$ and get 3 times the money, you are ahead by $2.

Regardless, it is safe to say that we are long way from the day when compilers are able to catch errors in application logic.

Tests are important no matter the language that is used. All I am saying is that you will have to write more tests if you are using a dynamically typed language — and this should be taken into account when measuring productivity.