use Antigravity;

[prog]

Man, nothing was bumming me out so much yesterday as learning that Randall "xkcd" Munroe publicly switched his (non-Lisp) programming allegiance from Perl to Python. I read that cartoon when it was new, but I didn't bother rolling over the alt text (I seldom do) until radtea made reference to it yesterday. Munroe drew the cartoon just a few months after drawing a great one that celebrated Perl (if somewhat backhandedly), so I just thought he was giving equal measure to both languages.

I don't know why I care about stuff like this, but it seems that I do. It's pragmatically meaningless to me; jobs.perl.org continues to have more postings every month than the one before, and the rare times I run into a direct challenge of Perl's authority in my professional life, I have always been able to swat it down easily. (I mean, usually they're something like "So-and-so told me that Perl is just a glue language, and it's outdated even for that. And that it's ugly and unmaintainable! He said we should use PHP instead." Hurr.)

And it's not like I'm against learning new languages. I'm picking up C# for another project, right now. (Yes, there's an overdue post there.) But switching one's home language in a particular work-area, and then flaunting it (while being an in-circles ultra-popular cartoonist), I dunno. Imagine a media personality you enjoy, and who happens to be a Red Sox fan, going onto the Daily Show to renounce the team and put on NY pinstripes while the audience cheers. (Er, also imagine that you grew up in a Boston-area sports-loving house, OK?) I feel like that. It's nothing that affects me directly, but I still feel a loss, somewhere.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

He may have switched his baseball team allegiance but at least he's still in the correct religion (Lisp). And prog, have you heard the Good News?

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The way we interact emotionally with programming languages and the communities around them is curious.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I have to say I prefer Python syntactically, while simultaneously envying Perl's insane number of libraries. But they're both imperfect and I really don't understand the religious wars programmers have about language choice. The games industry uses C++ almost universally and, while I fuckin' hate the language, there isn't one that's better for the task.

Anybody who says PHP is a good language really IS stupid tho. It's *convenient* and that's about all.