The transitions I made from FORTRAN to PL/I to C to C++ to Java to Perl to PHP were each pretty painless
How do you go from Perl to PHP without pain? You lose pretty much every good language feature in the process, and significantly reduce the number of tools and libraries you have access to. This remark blows my mind.
What I meant was that much of what I learned with language N was applicable to language N+1.
Some of these new programming models don't seem as if they build on concepts that are familiar to me.
Maybe I'm overstating this, but I get the sense that we are approaching some sort of discontinuity where the developers who can take these new, non-procedural, declarative, loosely typed, implicitly parallel systems and make them dance and sing will be light years ahead of the last generation and their pithy procedural languages.
How do you go from Perl to PHP without pain? You lose pretty much every good language feature in the process, and significantly reduce the number of tools and libraries you have access to. This remark blows my mind.