From: Felipe Contreras Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:16:48 GMT Subject: Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/ Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 11:09 AM, David Lang wrote: > On Thu, 6 Jun 2013, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> In the end my point remains unchanged; Perl is declining, so it would >> be wise for the future to use another scripting language instead. > > > 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? But that's exactly what we are asking the newer generations of developers; to learn another language. Fewer and fewer new contributors will come with knowledge of Perl. > What are the odds that the 'newer' language that you pick is going to pull a > "python 3" on you? Ruby 2 speaks volumes on that front. > 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. Yet it's declining, more and more every year. And the more the time goes by, the more we hurt ourselves. -- Felipe Contreras