For those who don't know, Ingy is a fairly prolific Perl developer [1]. The position he espouses here is quite typical of folks developing modern Perl. The crux of it is that it is better to provide an interface or API for a smaller bit of code that is easily spoken with than one tucked away in the bowels of a massive framework that's tied to a specific language. This position is really a reiteration of Ken Thompson's Rule of Modularity within the Unix Philsophy [2].
To me, this is a noble design goal because it allows developers to use the programming languages they're comfortable with and/or those that best fit the task at hand. I feel that this general principle has been the guiding force behind Google developing Protocol Buffers [3] and Facebook developing Thrift [4]. Software seems easier to build in small pieces that interoperate than if the developers try to build a monolithic and homogenous system all in one go.
It saddens me to see so many folks dismiss this position as a "fad" when it's one of the points to the open source movement.
A Perl/Unix Way of Thinking (Score:5, Informative)
For those who don't know, Ingy is a fairly prolific Perl developer [1]. The position he espouses here is quite typical of folks developing modern Perl. The crux of it is that it is better to provide an interface or API for a smaller bit of code that is easily spoken with than one tucked away in the bowels of a massive framework that's tied to a specific language. This position is really a reiteration of Ken Thompson's Rule of Modularity within the Unix Philsophy [2].
To me, this is a noble design goal because it allows developers to use the programming languages they're comfortable with and/or those that best fit the task at hand. I feel that this general principle has been the guiding force behind Google developing Protocol Buffers [3] and Facebook developing Thrift [4]. Software seems easier to build in small pieces that interoperate than if the developers try to build a monolithic and homogenous system all in one go.
It saddens me to see so many folks dismiss this position as a "fad" when it's one of the points to the open source movement.
Re: (Score:2)
So as a Perl developer i guess he is not big on rich user interfaces? How does he propose to sucessfully convert say a Windows Forms UI to PHP?
Oh! I get it, that's out-of-scope, who needs UIs? We can all just run a bunch of command line scripts and applications.
But wait, didn't we do that already .. I seem to remember it being called Unix.
I for one welcome this bright new future!