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For example, Python has evolved into an extremely intuitive yet powerful programming language.
Perl was also fairly new in its time.
There's GNU Emacs which is one of the most powerful text editors in existence.
There's the Apache Webserver. Although webservers aren't new, I would hardly call Apache a copy of anything.
I'm not sure whether the first publicly-released blog software was open source, but I think it might have been.
OpenBSD was, AFAIK, the first secure-by-default modern Unix system.
Linux (the kernel) has also done (or been modified to do) several things not done before.
X11 started as a project out of MIT (which I would guess was open-source, even though the phrase hadn't been coined yet.)
GNU readline is also something that is exclusive to open source
I'd guess that ls --color was something new to free software, as well, just because I douby anyone with a pure profit motive would consider it worth the time to implement. :-)
The Debian Project has made several innovations in operating system integration.

Anyway, there are plenty of examples. You just have to look.

First, I think it's great that the JBoss Group is doing this, because we're going to need this kind of support from Big Business in order for open source software to succeed at the Enterprise level, or even at the Voyager level. Too often I've heard complaints from PHBs, PBSs, and PBJs that Apache, with or without mod_python and mod_perl support simply wasn't scalable in the Enterprise environment, or wasn't trustworthy without lawsuit indemnification.

Considering this, however, I'm not sure this is the way to handle the problem. Shouldn't JBoss, instead of seeking to ward off the lawsuits over the rather insulting and tasteless use of the name (and name recognition!) of these proud people, instead simply change the name? Yes, I know that many Native American groups have decried the use of the Apache name for a simple open-source software project, and have threatened to make their demands much, much more vocal, and much, much more litigious since the appearance of Apache Geronimo (adding insult to injury, for sure!). The Native Americans have suffered enough at the hands of the white man. The White Man took their land, stole their women, and raped their horses for centuries. Now, they seek to commercialize even their name, thereby robbing this proud people of the last vestige of their heritage.

Consider this, fellow hackers. How often here on Slashdot do we writhe in anger and gnash our teeth at media outlets who confuse us with "crackers?" I for one hate being mistaken for an inbred redneck. Consider how these fine Native Americans feel, with only the memory of their lost greatness, along with the white devil's firewater and casino loot, to console them? Not good, I tell you, not good. It's time for us to take a stand with our loin-cloth clad brother, the Native American, and tell JBoss, "No more, indian-givers. Take your small-pox infected web server and depart, before we red-skinned savages scalp you, and sell your hides at county fairs and craft shows. This week: Tony Bennett. Two drink minimum."

virii is not a word, Mr. Anonymous troll.

it's viruses, not "virii"

You might call them virii, but I call them viruses.

http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

"Perl contains a set of built-in security checks know as taint mode. These checks protect you by insuring that tainted data that comes from somewhere outside your program is not used directly or indirectly to alter files, processes, or directories. "

What? PHP has no taint mode?-P

imagine if all languages were named in honor of the ladies.

Here's a couple to get you started ...

- Ada
- Perl

You should not have been allowed to graduate from medical school not knowing that the plural of "virus" is "viruses."

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
The alt.comp.virus FAQ
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

That would be the Perl Power Tools project.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

The plural of "virus" is not "vira" or even "virii." It's "viruses."

Boring, I know. Read here for more info.

Bit OT, but there goes;

Plural of virus is viruses, virus didn't have a classical plural form. And if it was pluralised like radius, it would be pluralised to viri (one trailing i) as the rule is -us => -i.

See This page for details.

MushMouth wrote: Then the plural would be vira, there is no second I to get the Nomanative plural. Virii is wrong no matter what.

http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html discusses the question in more detail. Second-declension neuter in -um has a plural in -a, but it's far from undisputed that the same would apply to words in -us. In fact, according to that page, it's far from undisputed that virus was even second-declension. Classical writers were so inconsiderate not to leave us footnotes about that sort of thing. :)

But also from that page: Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie. You won't find any disagreement from me there. The English plural is 'viruses', and that's the end of the matter, or should be. But you'll note that the (originally incorrect) plural 'octopi' *has* made it into dictionaries, which does give it some veneer of acceptability. It's possible that 'virii' could end up going the same way, though I do hope not. I'll still frown on both of them, but I doubt that'll change anything.

My, that's more Latin than I thought I'd remember.

The -us ending of virus suggests it may fall into the second declension. Nominative plural ending of 2nd D. nouns and adjectives in Latin is -i. If virus is 2nd d masculine as its ending suggests, its nominative plural form would be viri. Although a look at this page on the word virus suggests that it may be of fourth declension, in which case the parent post would be correct: virus (with a long u). It goes on to argue that perhaps the word virus was never used in plural because the noun itself already refers to a group of things.

Maybe I'm just being an anal-retentive grammar Nazi, but I simply can't respect an author who uses the non-word "virii" in his works.

Sorry. It's simply not a word. He might as well be writing in l33tspeak.

Jeremy

*sigh* Why don't people get the plural of virus right? This is why babies cry.

and yes, I know it's technically virii

No it bloody isn't! It's viruses, as explained here and here, in more detail than you can shake a stick at.

>(and yes, I know it's technically virii)
The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context. Here's why.

Ve have vays of making you speak ...

I know it's a lot to ask on Slashdot, where grammar and spelling aren't exactly second nature, but can we please get over this pseudo-latinistic plural of the word virus?

I know it's vogue with geeks to use latin plurals, but as anyone who has studied latin knows (and I realize nowadays not many people can claim this), not every word ending in -us is a second declension masculine noun (whose nominative plural, of course, ends in -i).

It's a good guess for most words ending in -us obviously of latin origin (focus, for example), but it doesn't hold in all cases and you should definitely do your homework.

But since this is Slashdot, I did your homework for you. Check out this page for an explanation.

Be warned, though, it sort of assumes that you have a brain. Those lacking need not read it. For those of you that just want to take my word for it, the plural is 'viruses' (that wasn't so hard, now was it).

VIRUSES!

VIRUSES!

VIRUSES!

You know, with all these virii running around

"viruses", man. "viruses" is the plural of "virus".

How the hell do you get "virii"? That would be the plural of "virius", if such a word existed.

You aren't changing English there, my friend. You're trying to change Latin, which is a dead language. If you want an extensive explanation, please see:

What's the Plural of `Virus'?
Google Answers: What is the plural of Virus?

Oh, and by the way, language changes occur rather slowly and by a real need of the speakers. Have you seen any words like "homie" make it to a traditional dictionary? I thought so.

You apparently don't know Latin. First, the plural of cactus is "cacti," and by the same logic, the plural of "virus" should be "viri," not "virii," which would be the plural of "virius" (which is not a word in Latin or English).

Second, Latin is annoying in that it has more than one declension table, and no shortage of complex rules. For instance, the plural of "genus" is "genera." "Viri" is already a Latin plural; it means "men" (plural of "vir"), and it is also already the genetive singular of "virus." The tricky thing is that "virus" is one of only a few words in its declension/gender/ending group, and all these words are mass-nouns (ie, they refer to a substance and therefore do not have plurals, just as "milk" does not have a plural in English). "Virus" itself means "poison," and in Latin it is a mass noun and has no (recorded) plural.

See also corpus->corpora, status->status (with a long u instead of short), octopus->octopodes (in Greek).

ref

Of course you mean viruses not virii.

cacti is still ok though

I have just now written a version of readline() that: (1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API (2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function (3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a non-infective version of the library API ,this means that readline() is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination. Enjoy! Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively purged of the virus. Freedline can be obtained Here Rejoice!

GPL'd libraries purged of GNU virus

I have just now written a version of readline() that:

(1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API
(2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function
(3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL

Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a
non-infective version of the library API ,this means that readline()
is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination.

Enjoy!

Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is
not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively
purged of the virus.

Freedline can be obtained Here

Rejoice!

You need perl 5.6 for that.

5.005_03 seems to be a baseline for which a lot of scripts are written (that don't want to count on the latest). It's what's installed on our Solaris box.

ObNotation: I want to make an I ching notation, using the 2 symbols (bar, broken bar) as bits, so 6 bits per hexagram. Printable ASCII is 96 characters, but if you leave out upper case, space and tab, you only have to drop 4 more symbols to fit.

qrpff would be my choice, but it uses every punctuation mark but ! and `, so it won't fit. A base64 of a bzip2 comes out a bit longer, but it's too obscure. Instead, I like just leaving the four characters after z, {|}~ untranslated.

472 characters would give us 20 & 1/2 23 character rows.

Hmmm... use a perl script to generate postscript for this?

Too bad Ryan Neaveill's font has both cases & so little punctuation.

the language is becoming more obtuse if thats possible.

Read the last page of Exegesis 6 to see the Perl 5 version of the code. It's astonishingly simpler and clearer in Perl 6.

The perl programmers I know don't get along well with other languages, mostly because they have spent so much time learning the intricacies of Perl syntax.

See the Inline modules on the CPAN.

I've never met a perl programmer who could tell me what a design pattern is either.

See Perl Design Paterns, an article on Perl.com.

I guess they don't go for re-use much in perl progging.

See the CPAN.

I think if I went to hell, satan would probably make me write a Perl parser. (without the help of Yacc)

I've read the Perl parser. You're right about this one.

the language is becoming more obtuse if thats possible.

Read the last page of Exegesis 6 to see the Perl 5 version of the code. It's astonishingly simpler and clearer in Perl 6.

The perl programmers I know don't get along well with other languages, mostly because they have spent so much time learning the intricacies of Perl syntax.

See the Inline modules on the CPAN.

I've never met a perl programmer who could tell me what a design pattern is either.

See Perl Design Paterns, an article on Perl.com.

I guess they don't go for re-use much in perl progging.

See the CPAN.

I think if I went to hell, satan would probably make me write a Perl parser. (without the help of Yacc)

I've read the Perl parser. You're right about this one.

I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, Perl 5 is an extremely good language for quick scripting things. That's what it was designed for. Sure, you can do big projects in it, but it's not exactly ideal. Recently I've started using Ruby as well, and I intend to move my department over to it instead of wasting time with Perl 6.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

I think you should reserve judgement until there is an implementation. Otherwise sweeping statements like 'perl6 won't make development any faster' are pretty hard to justify or to disprove.

By all means attack perl5, or dismiss perl6 as vapourware.

FWIW, the huge ugly monster that is Mozilla seems to have turned out rather well in the end - it just took far too long to get there. It's not perfect, but it has succeeded in its own aims (be a portable web browser suited for everyday use).

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

What's with all the anti-Perl flamebait? It's fine to prefer PHP or Python or whatever, but at least give Perl the credit that it's due. It's fast, really truly cross platform, widely distributed, open source, munges text like nothing else, was the first decent backend to websites, and has a bunch of useful design patterns built into the language.

And regular expressions, too! Like Perl, you may hate the syntax but but you've got to love the power. Ah yes, it's like one of those fire-breathing car-crushing truckosauruses... ugly but mighty. I heart Perl.

(Before you hit reply, yes, I am aware of the bad aspects of Perl. But most of them are optional, and I can live with the ones that aren't.)

Of course, if you just go read the Apocalypses and Exegeses on perl.com and the FAQ on parrotcode.org, you get all of this for free.

Those of you unfamiliar with Perl history may find it interesting that the "Parrot" started out as an elaborate April Fool's day joke two years ago. Here is the book that was announced. Strangely enough, people found the idea useful and are now actively developing it!

You are right that for a task that consist almost entirely of dictionary operations perl maybe the better tool, but your reasons are basically just anecdotical evidence.

I am usually suspicious of claims that higher programming languages are faster than C, since they are almost always implemented in C themselves (like perl). Also factors of speedups greater than 5 usually suggest a design flaw instead of an optimization problem. A skilled C/C++ programmer will have no problem making the same task as fast as perl.

I agree that implementation time is another important factor, but spending a few hours to make a tool faster so thousands of users can run their tasks a little faster and save many more combined hours is easily worth it.

For smaller tasks, like comparing or adding a few numbers as num-utils mostly does, accessing the perl interpreter soon becomes a big memory,file io and cpu overhead, so imho C would have been the better choice here.

...that could be of interest to everyone else too.

While its a good thing that the specification for dSVG be proposed as a candidate for a standard, it currently clearly isn't one and the only existing implementation relies on DTD and EcmaScripts that have been developed by Corel and are own and copyrighted by Corel.

It would be many moons before dSVG ever becomes a standard, if ever (I hope it will be though).
In the meantime, anyone wanting to use dSVG would either have to use Corel's scripts or rewrite the whole language implementation.
The latter clearly being a potential trouble for a burgeoning new language (everyone could have her own variation, especially as dSVG is far from being complete and stable in features), if Corel is serious about getting people to use dSVG (which I think they are), then they should release their implementation under an Open Source license.
It doesn't have to be the GLP which is too strict and may probably slow the adoption of dSVG in corporate environments, but something like the Artistic License would certainly ensure that people are free to use Corel's fine work without fear of getting in trouble.

Another question regarding the performance of dSVG: since it is yet another abstraction layer over what is already a fairly thick pile of interpreters, parsers and renderers, it's not fast.
By that I mean that long lists and complex interfaces take quite a bit of time to update. This makes me wonder about building complex applications, or even simple ones that display a lot of data in lists for instance
Do Corel have any plan to incorporate dSVG directly inside their plug-in?
That would certainly save time (there are a lot of ecmascript files to be loaded and interpreted), and should make the interface more responsive.
Plus it would give Corel's plug-in and edge over the Adobe's, in the corporate world at least.

I think the choices that Corel do now are going to affect the adoption of dSVG very significantly, and I'm not talking about just commenting on the Specification itself, as good and promising a start as it may be.

Any time someone asks me that question, one of my first response to the "is such and such scalable" is to read this article: Building a Large-scale E-commerce Site with Apache and mod_perl

Some of the number in there are damn impressive, compred to most Windows setups I've seen.

oh, fuck.

"And, golly, why break the talk up into 11 "pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly, perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!"

Well, you could always click on the link to the single page printable version.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

Bingo.

Don't think that O'Reilly doesn't know this either. Check out how many books, articles, and so forth they have published since OS X came out. I had the privilege a few months ago to have a sit down with the current editor of the Apple books, and from the way he talked it seems that O'Reilly is nothing short of ecstatic about the OS.

O'Reilly, IMHO, publishes by far the best books on the market. This is because they have excellent editors and scouts (for lack of a better word) to find very intelligent, very insightful people to write their books. I suggest people check out there dev sites more often; they are treasure troves of info

The O'Reilly Network

MacDevCenter.com

OnDotNet.com

OnJava.com

OnLamp.com

openp2p.com

osdir.com

Perl.com

XML.com

What is the goal of English?

What is the goal of Perl?

As you can see there is no specific goal other than the general ability to communicate with the computer. And as any human language, programming languages should have the ability to evolve with the times as progrmmers aquire new habits and tastes. Languages are designed to serve the programmer. If a language stay loyal to their own goals, its speakers ( the programmers ) will begin to evaporate. Adaptability and change of goals is a very important ingredient to the language. This is certainly true for perl.

You will find more info about languages in Allison's article at www.perl.com Perl Philosophy .

is there...