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

[Fairlight]

At Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 11:39:17AM -0700 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bill Campbell was observed uttering:
> 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). 

And how many versions of gcc have been out in the last few years?  Geez.
I'm not even sure what they're adding.  :)

> >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.

Fortunately, perl seems to -rarely- break backwards compatablity.  The only
thing I can think of is the case where they started requiring @ to be
escaped inside interpolated strings, and that was -ages- ago between v4 and
v5.  Better ways of doing things come out, but they rarely break the old
ways.  I hear it's not so in the PHP world, where one minor release to the
next can rip a function right out from under you.

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

A bit.  :)

> >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.

I recently tried perl -d.  *cough*  Uhm, I have better luck using gdb with
C code, to be honest.  I can -use- that.  Granted, I only tried this for
like 30min, but debuggers have never been particularly easy for me to use.
I prefer to rely on an old maxim my C mentor impressed upon me, which can
be applied/extrapolated to any language:  "Remember, printf() is your
friend!"

I've rarely found something that couldn't be narrowed down with a little
debugging output, if I have the source.

mark->
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