On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 10:04 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them.
Yes but it has been obvious for a long time that python does not consider backwards compatibility to be important. This shouldn't have come as a surprise. By comparison, perl has been around longer and
Judging by some of the comments on the fedora-devel list, it did anyway.
through more changes and yet about the only thing you might have to check on a program written for perl 1.x to run under 5.x would be whether you have @ in double-quoted strings that you wanted to remain literal.
I used to do a lot of coding in perl, but I found that I liked python better. I still like python for quick and dirty one-offs, but I'm not going to use it for large and persistent projects.
One other consideration is that perl probably has the current advantage in terms of available code library modules. Pretty much anything you can imagine doing has already been done and contributed to CPAN so often the code you have to write yourself is trivial with the modules doing the bulk of the work. Java may be catching up in this regard but I don't think there is a central place to find available code.
Google? ;)
I guess the real question is how well java is going to prosper under Oracle's ownership. Then again, with openjdk, it might not matter too much.
Dave