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Perl6 for Mortals
horos1 writes: "Hey all, I just ran across an article over at O'Reilly - Perl 6: Not Just For Damians which covers a lot of the negative commentary posted by slashdot on perl6 'featureitis'. Very interesting read, and IMO makes a hell of a lot of sense."
If you don't like a particular feature of the language don't use it. After all, the motto of perl is 'there's more than one way to do it'.
It seems to me that we should be praising the perl developers for perl6, not criticizing them. And I bet most of the moaners and whiners never wrote a line of open source code in their lives.
Well. Here are some:
.NET has get, I would say that people will love this feature. Or think of having a single mod_perl-like Apache module that can efficiently run Perl, Python, Ruby, Php, without needing a separte scripting engine for each one.
* True OO. This the killer one. Everything will be an object. Core functions will return objects. And you will have a decent (and probably extraordinary) syntax for creating classes. This is something that perl5 lacked, and it was killing slowly perl.
* Unicode support. Perl didn't have Unicode support, and adding it to perl5 was making everybody crazy. Not having unicode support is something too bad to bear in the age of XML and Unicode-supporting databases.
* A GC system that sucks less.
* Real multi-thread support. Perl didn't play well with MT, even worse than python (which forces you to have a global lock for everything). Perl6, on the other hand, will have MT support build from the start, and it will be as good as it can get.
* A general clean-up of the syntax, which will surely pay off on the long-term.
* A complete change on the inners. Perl will run on top of Parrot, which is a general-purpose register-based VM for scripting languages. There is the real possibility that in the mid-term languages like python, ruby, and probably many other will target Parrot, and thus getting all the benefits (true GC, real MT, and many others) of Parrot without having to duplicate all the effort.
This will also give the ability to call Perl modules from Python or Ruby objects from any other Parrot language. Considering the good response that MS
Perl 6 is important. Please don't let the little details you may don't like make you forget about the fact, that Perl definitetly needed a rewrite, and that it can be a very good thing for the OS community as a whole, not just for Perl hackers.
One of the coolest things about the Perl 6 development is that it leads to lots of improvements available right here, right now with Perl 5.
Attribute for example have been incorporated in perl 5.7.2, and a whole unch of new modules by Damian and others use them in tons of creative ways.
I am not sure this would have been done without the Perl 6 process. It forced the whole community to re-examine the language, take a step back and think of new ways to improve it. This would have been much more difficult if we had not had license to do it freely under the Perl 6 RFC process. This is the kind of things that keep a community alive and creative.
And BTW Perl 6 will still let you write quick'n dirty one-liners, and the first goal of the design of the interpretor is Speed (Larry mentionned "and it'has to be fast" about 25 times in 60 seconds in his last State of the Onion0.
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Says who ? If you don't use it for "general programming purposes", you're not in much of a position to make such a judgement.
Perl code can be readable and maintainable if it's written in C style and deliberately excludes the more esoteric features of the language.
It's disingenious to call the OO support in perl a "more esoteric feature" of the language -- nearly all the modules use it. If you use the modules, you're not really using a "C-style" any more, because you're using perl OO code.
For anything else, and any "serious" - i.e. complex - programming, pick C/C++ or Python.
You're getting bogged down in false dichotomies, and arbitrary/absurd classifications. What if you want to write a shortish (~1000 lines) program that leverages an existing module , and the program isn't a drop-in shellscript replacement ? And what if there's no such module for python ?
I know I'm going to be modded to hell for this, but here goes: /. in this day and age? It wasn't that long ago that it actually was worthwhile to read people's comments here, but nowadays I mostly see my "threshold" going up, up, and not wanting to stop. I saw this article and thought "Wow! A nice, positive article about Perl 6 on my fave site /. which uses Perl", you know. And then I read all these pointless, silly and sometimes even mean comments about how baaaaaad Perl 6 is, and how everything Larry has done is wrong and screw Perl 'cause it's a sucky language, I use {Java|Python|New mega-exciting superlanguage} instead.
What's wrong with the people posting to
So do that.
Personally, I think Perl is the "Nike-language": Just Do It. When I want to code in C or C++ (I like C, I'm not too happy about C++) I always have to do all these things first. Look at man pages all the time, worry about casts and memory allocation and what not. When I do something in Perl I just do it. I find the modules, write some code, and it works.
And that's worth a lot.
:wq!
It took me ages to learn to juggle but now I can keep three things up in the air instead of two. It took me a fair ammount of time to grok Perl but now it lets me be very productive. Complicated things take time to learn, so don't write it off just because it doesn't look (or think) like C/C++/C#/Java. To the people saying "use C/C++/Java for proper apps" it's like saying "don't build your house from wood, you must use bricks".
Why all the griping? Am I also supposed to feel inadequate or frightened because I've not mastered Perl 5 and am now faced with Perl 6? Afraid not. I may not be a Perl wizard, but my scripts do some heavy lifting.
As a biologist turned bioinformatics programmer, I find Perl to be a fantastic tool. Bioinformatics Perl = string processing and glue. My Perl scripts move LARGE numbers of sequences in and out of Postgres DBs, feed and clean up after a variety of open source tools (written in C, python, tcl, and perl), serve up web based tools, and all within a clustered linux environment.
I openly admit to cracking the camel book and visiting cpan on a regular basis. I do this not because I'm a slave to a complex language, but because I find Perl and its associated community to be a rich source of tools. I harvest what I need to get the job done now.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
I agree. And the funny thing is that perl is not at all hard. When I first started serious programming I tried learning C and I dabbled in Java but I just couldn't *get* it. And then I discovered Perl and everything was right with the world.
Don't like the crazy symbols? Don't use them! Other than the $ @ % you can get by without using things like $_. And I'm sure with perl6 you won't have to use $^ if you don't want to. There's more than one way to do it. AND to one guy stated in an earlier comment that he couldn't read his own Perl after just two weeks -- don't whine comment your code.
A lot of people use and love perl, there's no reason to flame it even if you don't
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