There’s one common criticism that I don’t get: That Perl 5 is hard to learn. I have a theory about this, but warning, rant incoming.
People used to read programming books. I learned both Perl and C from books; for me Perl wasn’t any harder. Yes, the syntax is unique — but you learned to read weirder things, C++ certainly isn’t any more intuitive in a vacuum.
But of course, few people read books anymore, so where do people learn languages? I guess universities and blog posts. (And increasingly YouTube videos, which have even less content density.)
Universities only teach old versions of Java. Blog posts are limited in size. Sad conclusion: any language that has more than a blog post’s worth of differences to Java 1.x will find it hard to reach very broad adoption.
People used to read programming books. I learned both Perl and C from books; for me Perl wasn’t any harder. Yes, the syntax is unique — but you learned to read weirder things, C++ certainly isn’t any more intuitive in a vacuum.
But of course, few people read books anymore, so where do people learn languages? I guess universities and blog posts. (And increasingly YouTube videos, which have even less content density.)
Universities only teach old versions of Java. Blog posts are limited in size. Sad conclusion: any language that has more than a blog post’s worth of differences to Java 1.x will find it hard to reach very broad adoption.