The “tragic tradeoff” in programming languages:
I still remember a wonderful presentation by Damian Conway a number of years ago about all of the great ways Perl 6 could turn into whatever domain specific language you needed it to be. It was beautiful, I was awestruck. I’ve always enjoyed Perl as a language. But I walked out of that presentation thinking “That was so beautiful, and I don’t want it anywhere near my business.” Because the last thing I need is software written in a language I can’t hire anyone else to maintain.
At some level that’s what I think has happened to Perl in general. I never liked Python much, until I got forced to use it on a new team. Now I’m convinced that it has a really distinct advantage — there aren’t too many ways to write Python, so an experienced Python developer can figure out code pretty quickly. But Perl programs are frequently art pieces that take a lot of effort to truly grok.
From HN, “What happened to Perl 7“
Abacus Noir 