[PRL] Perl 6

[Matthias Felleisen]

On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 11:18 AM, William D Clinger wrote:

>   "If I had had such great features for 40 years (macros),
>    and if nobody had used my language, I would be embarrassed."
>
> Oh, I don't know.  We had garbage collection for 35 years
> while most commercial programmers denied any need for it.
> If they had been completely unaware of it, I'd have been
> embarrassed, but as it is the embarrassment I feel is for
> them.
>
> Will
>

Why do we always blame the others for such failures?
Isn't it us, the college professors, who don't stand up
in class and make sufficient fun of Java and C++ and C
and Fortran and colleagues who insist on being as far
behind as industry's state-of-the-art aka "fashionable"?

We all know that fashionable != innovative. And yes, we
need to teach some fashionable stuff, but we need to
use our own "dog food" and show off our stuff in class
so that these kids go out into the real world knowing
that (1) we know how to build good software and (2)
they don' t know enough. Achieving (2) is probably the
best we can do for them.

-- Matthias