[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs (quite a bit off topic)

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/28/15 5:49 PM, johnson.eric at gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 1:57:08 PM UTC-5, JF Mezei wrote:
>
>> (consider the ephemeray scripting languages such as perl, php, python,
>> ruby on rails etc which are "soupe du jour" and change rapidly. It is
>> worth teaching those to first year uni students ?
>
> I think you are being unnecessarily disparaging to at least perl, python
> and ruby. In particular, perl and python have been around for nearly 20
> years each. Ruby has easily been around a decade on its own too. They
> are hardly passing fads.

Perl has been around in some form since 1987, Perl 5.x since 1994, with
the first VMS port right around that time as well. And yes, it does
closures and functional programming and a bunch of other fancy things
that have come along since its initial release. It's a serious
programming language as well as a scripting language and many large,
heavily-loaded systems depend on it.