[uninverted]

I wonder if perl would be less popular if it was a better language.

[bprater]

Are we seriously going to have this argument? This is Hacker News, where most of us don't play the Ford/Chevy game with programming languages. Most of us have used multiple languages and know exactly when to employ the right tool for the job.

Perhaps we should have a new rule: if you haven't built a full-scale web app in a specific language, we'd prefer you not comment on it.

[chromatic]

Why a web app? I write a lot of software which has nothing to do with the web, and I use Perl very happily for some of it.

[jrockway]

I just assumed he typo'd "something like" as the empty string.

[jrockway]

I wonder what the world would be like if people made their own choices, not influenced by what's "popular" this week.

[uninverted]

I don't care which language is popular, I want to know what makes a language popular. I try to choose languages orthogonally to popularity.

[jrockway]

I want to know what makes a language popular.

"Jobs."

[uninverted]

There's a chicken and egg thing here...

[jrockway]

Such is the reality of a field where the decision-makers are not practitioners.

[yan]

Then people would spend a lot more time electing better choices when they could have spent time working on solving their problem.

[jrockway]

Prove it.

(Every week I hear about some new asynchronous web server written in Python. Do people really want to spend time working on their own problems, or do they just want to type as much code into the computer as possible?)

[yan]

All I'm saying that evaluating every research language out there and seeing how well it suits your problem would just take too much time. Getting acquainted with a few well-known languages and a few DSLs or cult-followed languages should be sufficient.