Posted by
michael
on from the reading-the-tea-leaves dept.
mbadolato writes "Use.perl is running an interview with Larry Wall and Damian Conway, in which they answer questions about Perl 6. Questions were selected by the ten highest rated questions posed by readers last week."
Perl 6 is a mistake
by
keesh
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I know I'll get modded down for this. It'll sound too much like a certain *BSD post. Ah well...
I've been using perl since the Pink Camel. I've been using it a lot. 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.
One of the goals of Perl 6 is to remove this problem. 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.
The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse. 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, but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one.
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.
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 (and if that link didn't get me a -1, Troll I don't know what will...), which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'll get modded down for this. It'll sound too much like a certain *BSD post. Ah well...
:)
I've been using perl since the Pink Camel. I've been using it a lot. 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.
One of the goals of Perl 6 is to remove this problem. 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.
The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse. 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, but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one.
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.
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 (and if that link didn't get me a -1, Troll I don't know what will...), which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying.
Okay, I'm done, you can mod me down now