Exegesis 4 Out

BorrisYeltsin writes "perl.com has Exegesis 4 from the Damian, in repsonse to Larry's latest Apocalypse. This installment covers news of the new flow and block control changes, fully integrated exceptions and some other cool stuff!"

Comments

Perl 6 will be a painful, but necessary move ahead

[Ars-Fartsica]

perl6 is a total reset, and most people who claim to be perl experts are going to have to go back and relearn an almost entirely new language. That said, this is a healthy process. perl5 OO is horribly obtuse, and the perl internals are not inviting to modification as they should be.

Also, the perl6 project is introducing Parrot - a portable, language independent VM. As .Net and Java continue to evolve and prosper, the writing is on the wall - the next platform war will be in frameworks and VMs/JITs. There has to be a competitive open alternative in this market to keep the other players honest. Five years down the road I see Parrot as potentially more important than perl6 itself.

In any case it'll be nice to see how Larry and the gang put a perl twist on OO in the new language - knowing him there will be some useful enhancements for thinking programmers.

Re:Perl 6 will be a painful, but necessary move ah

[babbage]

Well if it makes you feel better, one of the hopes for Perl6 is that it should be able to process Perl5. With Parrot as an abstract backend, Perl6 is just going to be one of several available frontends for the Parrot engine. In principle, there's no reason why a Perl5 frontend can't also be written, just as there is interest in Python frontends, PHP frontends, Scheme, Forth, Tcl, etc.

This may be painful, yes, but it had to be done because the existing Perl codebase was such a mess that a reimplementation was seen as the only way for the language to keep evolving. In return from starting from scratch like this, the Perl community gets a lot of benefits: there will be lots of tasty new syntactic sugar (which you're welcome to ignore by writing Perl5 style code, but which will make a lot of tasks easier if you get used to the syntax), it should be easier to develop extension libraries (no more evil XS hackery, and PDL becomes much less necessary), it will be easier to port Perl to new platforms (like say Palm Pilots), and you get this great language engine out of Parrot.

Plus, the only reference implementation of Perl the language has been Perl the interpreter, and this bothers a lot of people for a lot of reasons. With this reworking, the language specification will be fleshed out in much better detail than has ever existed before, and the official reference implementation should be much easier to understand & work with, with actual abstraction of different working layers that should be replaced just as TCP/IP layers can be replaced. Ideally, this will allow others to come in and develop their own implementations of Perl the language, and that competition could stand to benefit us all.

Still, the funny thing to me is that all this Parrot work was born out of an April Fools Joke last year. Not only was it a funny joke -- unlike say everything that was posted here the other day -- but it has evolved into quite an interesting piece of software architecture. Be careful what you joke about, you just might get it... :)

New to Perl

[Tadrith]

Just thought I'd place a little comment in from a newbie to Perl, seeing as a lot of people are discussing the readability of Perl.

First off, I've been writing a database application with SQL Server 2000 and Visual Basic for the last year. Recently, I had to do some nasty work with some text documents. I understand the Visual Basic isn't the most popular language, but it has it's place... parsing text documents isn't it.

Long story short, I decided to try using Perl for it, instead, seeing as Perl is very well suited for the task. It only took me about 4 hours to complete what I needed to do with Perl, and that includes learning the language. So far I've found it very intuitive and it's certainly not any more difficult to read than anything else. If anything, I think Perl simply requires the reader know a bit more about the language, which isn't a bad thing, in my mind.

Maybe I had a better time with it since I've already done extensive work in C/C++, but I still think it's quite useful, and certainly not unreadable if the programmer takes the time to program it properly.