Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 6, 2013, 20:29 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0mwxfGJdZi6kSaAPr66o550RiT_p8_r_4mDvcd_VAFYQw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1306060904100.13204@nftneq.ynat.uz>

David Lang wrote:

> Perl use may or may not be declining (depending on how you measure it), but
> are you really willing to take on the task of re-writing everything that's
> in Perl into another language and force all developers of scripts to learn
> that other language? what's the ROI of this?

Let's not talk hypotheticals. git-svn.perl (+ perl/SVN/*.pl) is absolutely massive. It's an incredibly useful tool in that it actually works, and that there is nothing replacing it in the foreseeable future. This monster was written almost entirely by one brilliant person, and nobody is going to rewrite it. We don't start a huge discussion about what languages are "approved" before accepting such a contribution: if the contributor wants to write something in a dominant language (Perl in this case), and it's going to be useful, we merge it. End of story.

All this planning is a colossal waste of time, in my opinion.

> Perl isn't going to disappear any time soon. What makes you think that
> whatever language you pick to replace Perl is going to be more stable than
> Perl is?

Why are we discussing something that is indeterminate? It is impossible to foresee the future, but that is no reason to freeze _present_ development.

> and, like the parent poster, by 'stable' I mean from the compatibility point
> of view.

Various programming languages have different philosophies, and have grown in different ways. What matters is that some of them have a large number of users, and we're talking about one such example.

> What are the odds that the 'newer' language that you pick is going to pull a
> "python 3" on you?

This has to be a rhetorical, because I don't imagine you expect anyone to predict the future. As Felipe already pointed out Ruby 2.0 is a good sign.

Show 5 quoted lines

> There have been a very large number of scripting languages show up, make a
> lot of press, and then fade in favor of other languages while Perl has
> continued. It's not the sexy languange nowdays, but it's there, reliable,
> and used so heavily that there's really no chance of it dissapearing in the
> forseable future.

Nobody claimed that "press coverage" is a good metric. We can only talk about facts, and Felipe already showed you a TIOBE index graph. If you have overwhelming _evidence_ that Ruby is a weak language that will die soon, share it: otherwise, I see no value in this discussion.