@siracusa Both Perl and Python are closer on the geologic fossil record to COBOL (66 years old) than to our present day.

@doncruse @siracusa Yes, but Perl is from an earlier geological era

@codinghorror You’ve got it backwards. Perl’s DNA is a mixture of ALL the earlier species, not an isolated island of, say, significant whitespace indenting…

@siracusa

@codinghorror @siracusa I’m 100% here for this.

(And on the Perl side, even though I have not used it in decades.)

@codinghorror @siracusa and also, basically every language today handles strings more like Perl than any other programming language before it (other than sed and awk; not sure whether we should be fighting about whether those are languages, but they’re certainly ancestors of Perl)

@lkanies @siracusa there can be be only one programming language

@codinghorror @lkanies @siracusa perl is just a bunch of C macros that have escaped into runtime

@enobacon @lkanies @siracusa look, people: it's a done deal https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power