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

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>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). 

That's one of the characteristics of ``Cathedral'' architecture
where a few people write the languages, and they evolve slowly.

>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.

I haven't tried it with python, but ``ddd'' supports python.  I've used
that extensively with perl, and find it very helpful.

Bill
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