Languages as a moving target (was: Re: Perl question)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 05:37:13PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> PHP is eeeeeevilllllllll!  And people say -perl- is a moving target?  :)

You make an interesting point here, Mark; one which punches one of my
larger buttons.  And no, this is actually *not* a filePro sucks screed,
folks.  :-)

Is it my imagination, or do programming langues rev faster (higher? :-)
than they they did When I Was A Kid?

It seems to me that COBOL, Fortran, C, Pascal, and all the
"traditional" programming languages have a much longer revision cycle,
and much smaller changes than most of the more recently designed
languages (with the possible exception of Perl). 

PHP, Python, and things which are more 'environments' than languages,
like Zop, all seem to rev so fast that I can't even get my programming
knowledge stable in them before There's A Better Way To Do It.

Is this just me?  Or are language designers just antsy-pants these days
compared to, oh, Fortran 77 and Fortran *90*?

> I think I'll pass on PHP, thanks.  :)  I'd be far more tempted to actually 
> look at python, if I was in the market to learn YAL.

Lots of people like Python a lot.  I can currently read it, and modify
it a little, but not write it.  A debugger that would show current
execution context, stackframing and the like in realtime would help a
lot, but while there probably is one, I ain't found it yet.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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