SPUG: RE: PerlScript, IIS, and .NET

David Innes (CSG) davidinnes at chicagoscience.com
Mon Jun 17 17:14:10 CDT 2002


> Was this a conscious reference to Jonestown?  ;)

"Drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid" is a hybrid reference with Jonestown
overtones.  It's still more appealing than "eating your own dog food" which
is where I really think MS went wrong.

> Perl provides an ample replacement for DOS batch
> language ... Perl is always Perl and CPAN
> provides all the tools I need.
Yup, with Perl you get all the benefit of the *NIX church and nobody snubs
you for not knowing Latin. :-)

>I'm not sure what aspects of .NET seem modelled after
>Perl.  It's language-independent, so syntax of any particular
>language (e.g. C#) doesn't really count.  .NET is really
>about the class library and the CLR.  But I'm
>open to convincing, it's an interesting thought.

I don't remember that much about it except a colleague and I were sitting at
a Microsoft Developer Days demo a couple of years ago and the guy kept
saying "Unlike C, .NET doesn't stop you from blah blah blah" and we'd say to
each other "oh, just like Perl" and then he'd say "unlike VB, .NET gives you
blah blah blah" and we'd say "oh, just like Perl' and then someone else
would say "unlike Java, .NET doesn't stop you from blah blah blah, and we'd
say "oh, just like Perl."

We were just glorified script jockies, not real Computer Scientists, and we
might both have been fooling ourselves. :-)  But it was shortly after we
heard Larry and others talk about Perl6 at a Perl Conference in Monterey.

>I find it amusing that Parrot and the .NET CLR seem to
>sit in the same evolutionary niche, one step up from
>the Java runtime (which doesn't have multiple language
>support, to my knowledge).  I suppose this isn't
>accidental.  I'm privately rooting for Parrot to
>become the .NET killer somewhere down the road.

Parrot founders Larry and Guido van Rossum say Parrot will eventually
compile to the .NET CLR, but "not yet."  As I groused earlier, .NET imposes
limits on Perl.  According to the Parrot FAQ, "[The CLR and Java] VMs are
designed for statically typed languages. That's fine, since Java, C#, and
lots of other languages are statically typed. Perl isn't. For a variety of
reasons, it means that perl would run more slowly there than on an
interpreter geared towards dynamic languages."

		-- David Innes


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