[Israel.pm] Perl Port for pyconstruct

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sunday 18 May 2008, Shmuel Fomberg wrote:
> Hi All.
>
> I was looking at pyconstructs,
> http://construct.wikispaces.com/
> and thinking about making a port to Perl.
>
> What do you think? bad idea? is there a equivalent already?
>

Hi Shmuel!

Yes, pyconstruct seems very cool and I heard a presentation about it in one of 
the Python-IL meetings.

I should note that this Perl Foundation grant (originally a Google Summer of 
Code grant):

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/2008q2_grant_proposal_fixing_b.html

(mentioned here - 
http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/2008q2_grant_proposals.html ).

Aims at extending pyconstruct to support the .zip format.

As for a Perl port: I'm getting a bit sick of having to import good ideas from 
one language to another, duplicating effort, code, bugs, and increasing the 
maintenace effort. I suppose it's not always inevitable as:

1. It's easier to code in a high-level dynamic language than in C.

2. Sometimes wrapping a C code into several languages (or wrapping an API in a 
different language) will require heavily adapting it to the syntax, semantics 
and conventions of the target language, which is what may require the lion's 
share of the work.

I proposed a partial solution to this problem here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/ideas/#tucan

Of course, I don't propose that the World will standarise on one common 
programming language, because:

1. Even if I happen to think it is a good idea (which I don't), I'll need to 
convince the mass of programmers out there to convert to the common language. 
(And they are unlikely to want to convert).

2. There are already many millions lines of code written in any of Perl, 
Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, etc. and they cannot be easily converted to any other 
language. Hell, there are still huge COBOL codebases still around, and we all 
know how programmers loath COBOL.

Like it or not, maintaining existing code in its original language is much 
less costy than re-implementing it in a different language. And at the 
moment, Perl/Python/etc. code cannot benefit too much in code size from 
conversion into a different language, because these languages are very 
succinct and roughly comparable.

3. Diversity and competition are good, and settling on one common language is 
against the hacker-world "Do and Let Do" philosophy. By all means, we still 
need new languages.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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