History of Programming Languages III was AFC Book Listing, Big Update 3475

Eric Smith

That's precisely the reason I find it interesting. Well, I would argue that there was no planning to begin with!

A tool that quickly turned into a full-blown (or 12-times-overblown!) language used far and wide for things that weren't even imaginable during its initial design is FAR more interesting to me than a language that was heavily spec'ed, designed, and nobody actually uses :-).

In this respect it's sort of like how Fortran is largely the original language plus a lot of grown-in-the-wild extensions that has been "restandardized by committee" every decade or two. But not really the same because "vendor extension" doesn't really cut it in the perl world, and there's no committee, but instead a couple of guys who try to reign in the scope and redesign every so often.

I don't have a lot against Python, Ruby, etc., whatever the perl compebreastors are today, but they seem way too overdesigned-to-begin-with to be interesting :-). Java, yuck, that's not fun at ALL, designed by committee to begin with!

Just my personal taste.

I see things in the Perl evolution that are in common with every other language I ever even touched: BASIC, Fortran, APL, Smalltalk, C, etc. If Perl's evolution ever becomes a matter of academic interest (maybe it already is?) then there's potential for a zillion PhD thesis!

Tim.