On Mar 22, 9:43 pm, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: > On 23/03/2012 04:16, Steve Howell wrote: > > > > > > > > > On Mar 22, 8:20 pm, rusi<rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Mar 23, 7:42 am, Steve Howell<showel...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > >> > Do you think we'll always have a huge number of incompatible > >> > programming languages? I agree with you that it's a fact of life in > >> > 2012, but will it be a fact of life in 2062? > > >> It will be a fact of life wherever Godels theorem is; which put > >> simplistically is: consistency and completeness cannot coexist. This > >> is the 'logic-generator' for the mess in programming languages. > >> Put in more general terms: > >> Completeness is an 'adding' process > >> Consistency is a 'subtracting' process > >> Running the two together, convergence is hopeless. > > > Fair enough, but I don't think you can blame Godel's Theorem for the > > fact that JS, Ruby, Perl, and PHP all solve basically the same > > problems as Python in 2012. Can't we agree that at least *Perl* is > > redundant, and that the lingering existence of Perl 5 is an artifact > > of culture, legacy, and primitive experimentation (by future > > standards), not mathematical inevitability? > > Perl's support for Unicode is much better than the others. >
Maybe so, but is that an intrinsic feature of the language or just an implementation detail? Even if it's a somewhat intrinsic feature of the language, how hard would it be to subsume Perl's Unicode goodness into the best-of-breed language of all of Perl's cousins? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
