[SimHacker]

Speaking of software half-lives:

"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years." -ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005

[perigrin]

As I pointed out on Gabriel's blog. This quote is six (6) years old at this point. Even if it was arguably relevant at the time (Alan Kay giving witness to an internal transition period in the Perl community), I'm not sure how it's relevant now.

Without specifics on which ideas Perl has that you feel don't scale, and how ... this is merely trolling by appeal to authority.

[SimHacker]

If the ideas in Perl scaled, don't you think there would be a usable version of Perl 6 after more than 10 years?

And Perl 5 is certainly on its way out: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Perl.html

When Alan Kay made his remark, Perl had just hit its highest mark in popularity. And it just this year hit its lowest mark. So I think you've been holding your graph upside-down.

[perigrin]

I'm sorry I completely fail to understand how either of these remarks have any bearing on scalability?

How does the Perl6 project's ability (or lack of) to deliver a project to your undefined criteria for "usable version" have any bearing on the scalability of the ideas involved in either it or Perl5?

Second, in what way does a self-described popularity contest have bearing on the scalability of a language?

I would also love to hear how you would explain http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html which Alan Kay also talked about during that interview ... far more than the single quote he made about Perl. Note that according to the scale on both the Perl graph and the Lisp graph, Perl's lowest point is roughly equal to Lisp's highest point. The obvious explanation to me is that TIOBE score has almost nothing to do with Alan Kay's comments or opinions as expressed in that interview. So I don't understand what connection you're trying to imply exists here.

Perhaps you had your book on logical inference upside down?

[chromatic]

TIOBE is the phrenology of programming language discussions, and making changes in an established programming language is exceedingly difficult even when you intend to replace the existing version. See also Python 3000.

[eCa]

I would think that the number of big sites that is/were built on Perl (IMDb, Amazon, ...) would be a counter point to that.

Of course, it's not the right tool for everything - far from it - but it is a Swiss army knife.

[SimHacker]

And the number of companies still using COBOL and FORTRAN prove what? As Dr. Turing's proof demonstrates, they're both swiss army knives too.

[ufo]

The Church-Turing thesis is not a proof - it is a definition of computability. (The thesis is that it is the reasonable definition. For all I know someone could come up with a new kind of computation that is stringer then turing machines and then we would have to redefine our notions.)

[mst]

So after 15 years, software should have gone away.

Ok, then call me back when you've purged the world of C, lisp, Smalltalk and UNIX, and I'll give you a hand with perl :)

[perigrin]

You forgot Fortran, BASIC, SQL, x86 Assembler, HTML, HTTP, TCL, Python, Ruby ... 15 years ago was 1996, we've got a lot of crap to purge.