From: Niklas Frykholm <r2d2@...>
Date: 2002-06-26T18:53:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Andy Roonie meets Perl vs. Ruby... (I couldn't resist)

[Jan Witt]:
> But why did e.g. Ada, Smalltalk, CLOS not make it?
> Why did Perl get such a wide following?

Interesting and important questions. I think because of practicality.
And because there is one canonized implementation of Perl.

I really _would_ like to program in Smalltalk and Common Lisp. They
look like great languages and I would like to learn more about them.
But I'm still looking for a CLOS or smalltalk environment that

	* is free
	* is cross-platform
	* is easy to link to C code
	* has a reasonable supply of third party modules

There is Squeak of course. But that feels more like a toy than a
production environment. I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Perhaps it was the Open Source movement that provided the greatest
boost to Perl. Perhaps if Lisp and Smalltalk had been developed
later we would have great open-source implementations of them.

> And why is Java the real kludge of kludges?

Java has its good and its bad sides. It pretends to be type-safe but
isn't. You have to convert objects back and forth just to put them
into containers. You have to create hundereds of pointless little
objects, just because the language doesn't have first-class methods.

What's good about Java is that they have defined a standardized
API for EVERYTHING. This makes it real easy to swap module backends,
read other peoples code, etc.

// Niklas