Python won by perfecting two things: (1) syntax structure to be simple yet powerful, and (2) complete object/function standard library with module system.
Your project is very cool. Could you help me fix my account though? I messed up two of the IDs: mfrager@github & mfrager@reddit. Will these be automatically purged from the keys.pub server after a certain amount of time for being invalid?
This is very cool but I screwed up 2 of my "sigchains" to Reddit and to GitHub by deleting the underlying messages (I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to) so now two of my identities are messed up and I can't even use the app. I get this message: "panic: Unknown user status content-invalid (13)". Great project, but needs a better way to clean up invalid keys and re-issue them.
Ouch! This looks really bad. If/when Apple fixes this it may require all 3rd-party software that accesses the keychain to be updated. However that's not for sure. We will have to wait and see.
The biggest technical hurdle for this type of database right now is index lookup. Since the nodes on the indexes are encrypted the client/server requires a round trip for every binary tree index level that needs to be traversed. This makes what is usually one of the fastest database operations into a slow one.
Better in this case is purely a value judgement... The Perl language is very elegant and powerful, that's why most of the other languages were modeled on it. Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages. By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense.
I hope Perl 6 has better runtime speed and memory efficiency because those are the only downsides of Perl 5. However I seriously doubt that will be the case. Perl 6 will most likely be more bloated and slow, but I very much hope that I'm wrong.
Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl over a marginally faster runtime like Python or Java.
I see no reason to ditch Perl. I've been using Perl for years and I use it at my company with little problems. For our SaaS web application Perl is a perfect fit and allows us to code very quickly.
Also, Perl's CPAN gives us access to so much it's incredible.
I think Perl is still ahead of it's time and the best days for Perl are still ahead.