You could write apps to run on the [Openmoko](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko) [Neo FreeRunner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner). The [Rasterman](http://www.rasterman.com/) used to work for them (some info is on his site about related work he's doing now).

Some more info about the platform is in [this fsf blog post](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone...).

Markdown is probably the simplest and prettiest of the text markup formats.

And to answer your question, it's easier to hit the asterisk key than to reach for the mouse to hit the "italics" button.

Most people have no idea of what the asterisk key does, and have no experience in markup languages.

I guess I expect tools written in a language which emphasises usability for developers to do the same for users.

reddit, well-known for being written in Python, also uses markdown. So does this site, written in Arc.

What's your point?

This site does not use Markdown.

Please put some line breaks in there -- your post fouls up the rendering of the whole page of comments (it makes the page too wide).

> I’m also not advocating doing large projects in Perl.

Actually, you can nowadays. With Perl 5, use strict, use warnings, use Moose, write tests, and have a look at modern Perl best practices.

And, of course, Perl 6 should be quite well-equipped for handling large projects right out of the box, ... once that box gets here. :)

Yes, these days, people are free to choose. However, after trying the alternatives, I think Perl is still a winner.

I spent some time (maybe 6 months) with Python recently. The first few weeks you're amazed at how uniform and regular everything is. It's so simple! But then after you've gotten used to Python, it starts to wear on you that there's no shortcuts for things that you do n times / day. And it's not just that Perl saves you typing, it's that Perl doesn't annoy experienced programmers by making them do every single thing the uniform (and longer) way over and over.

Another thing is naming. There are various clumsily-named things in Python. For example, "dictionary"? It's a hash. "Tuple"? I don't blame Guido, because I don't believe he's a native speaker of the rat's nest we call the English language, but it almost appears that some things are named different from the Perl-equivalents just to be different. Anyway, what you find after having used both Python and Perl is that Perl really does have that smooth well-worn "I use this every day and it fits like a glove" feel, and a lot of that has to do with well-chosen names for things, and operators that look like what they do.