"Jonathan Dowland" <j...@debian.org> writes: > If we did have consensus that Perl should be retired, the question > should be replaced *with what*? I'd be very surprised if we could get > consensus on that; but I'd happily read people's suggestions. I guess > you'd advocate for Rust or Go, based on your slide deck.
> What criteria are important for such a recommendation? > (Please, not Python :P) I mean, you say that, but Python is by far the most obvious choice. It's the most popular programming language in the IEEE Spectrum 2024 survey by a very large margin, and the next most popular languages (Java, JavaScript, and C++) are all less suitable for this type of integration programming. You have to go down to eighth place before you find Go, at about a fifth the popularity of Python. Python is also replacing Java as the language of college CS classes, which means the base of people who know at least some Python is probably larger than any other language filling the same niche. I think the only real competitor to Python today on the popularity and existing knowledge front would be JavaScript, and I think it's less suitable for the type of development we do in Debian. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
