Perl may be great, but... (was Re: uutraffic report (in perl))

[Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard]

In article <3273 at convex.UUCP> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>Please don't take this wrong, but why DON'T you have perl?  If you can
>post this note, you can get perl.  It's freely available from FTP and
>plain old uumail-type archive servers all over the net.  Its author,
>Larry Wall, is the same man who brought you rn, metaconfig, and patch.
>He privately supports perl better than any industrial software house
>that I've ever seen.  He's extremely helpful in getting perl running on
>new machines, and I'll bet it's already been tweaked for your
>architecture.  If you've ever run one of Larry's Configure scripts, you
>know what I mean.

Perl won't run on my 286-powered system. Larry's comment about "perl
probably won't run on 16-bit systems" is dead on.

I'm watching the world do great things in perl, and I'm jealous, knowing
that Larry has succumbed to the Richard Stallman Syndrome: "That's not a
real computer, and I won't program to it." Richard is as blatant about
it as he is about the GNU Manifesto's real objectives. I don't really
think Larry has it in for 16-bit machines, but then again, perl could
have been written to avoid the more obvious limitations...as it is now,
perl crashes and burns spectacularly.

Just as net policy should not be made on the assumption that everyone
has rn (because it's not standard), programming should not be done on
the assumption that everyone has perl.

-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL   | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jay at splut.conmicro.com       (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity.
{attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +----------------------------------------
     _free press_, n.: 100 men imposing their prejudices on 100 million.