How to be popular

[mjd-perl-pm@plover.com]

Interesting article here about how to design a popular programming
language.  

http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/pop.txt

        
        It has sometimes been said that Lisp should use first and rest
        instead of car and cdr, because it would make programs easier
        to read. Maybe for the first couple hours. But a hacker can
        learn quickly enough that car means the first element of a
        list and cdr means the rest. Using first and rest means 50%
        more typing. And they are also different lengths, meaning that
        the arguments won't line up when they're called, as car and
        cdr often are, in successive lines. I've found that it matters
        a lot how code lines up on the page. I can barely read Lisp
        code when it is set in a variable-width font, and friends say
        this is true for other languages too.

This reminded me of how Larry made sure that 'next', 'last', and
'redo' were all the same length, so that people would be able to
remember them as a group.

There's a lot of other good stuff there too, including some that's
specifically about Perl.
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