Perl 6 Synopsis 5

XaXXon writes: "perl.com has Synopsis 5 for Perl 6 up. It's a brief overview of all the changes made in Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5. Lots of stuff about the new regex syntax. I must admit, however, that I'm getting tired of reading about perl 6 -- I want to start using it." We posted Larry Wall's 5th Apocalypse in May.

Comments

Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL

[Anonymous Coward]

For instance there is now OO COBOL but the only people that use it are COBOL programmers who are stuck, perhaps because of their company's dictates, perhaps by choice, with COBOL. In the same way perl may be heading towards irrelevance wrt "mainstream" language. I've written commercial perl in the past, it was a pain then and it's still a pain now. The thing is that now there are alternative languages in the same space (python, ruby etc., php for web side) that do the "perl thing" better than perl.

Perl was great, it introduced many people to programming, just like COBOL did. But now it's time to move on. To move on to languages that learnt from perl, that improved on it, that don't have to drag around a syntax and culture that values neat tricks and trying to guess what the programmer really meant over providing the needed building blocks and letting you build code that does what you say, not what it thinks it heard you say. Or even, dare I say it, to move on to languages outside the perl family for some programming and choose the right tool for the job for a change.

I'd prefer to think of this as provocative rather than a flame, there is a difference you know.

Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it amazing how many clueless people like you pipe up with the demise or Perl, or its unsuitability for X task, or some other random demerit. Slashdot is useless for Perl news because 9/10ths of the posts are clueless idiots writing about how awful Perl is, whereas those of us who actually use perl (to whom the information is pertinent) have to wade through it.

Your article is nothing but vague hand-waving. I am a professional programmer, I want specifics if you want me to take you seriously.

Rename it, it isn't Perl anymore

[ToasterTester]

Wall has changed the language too much and now more regex changes. Like Pascal when major updates became Modula or later Oberon. Original Pascal was left to evolve on it own. Same with Turbo Pascal when Borland heavily changed it they changed the name to Delphi. Call Perl 6 the new beast that it is.

Re:Perl 5 was nice

[selectspec]

I don't pretend to know anything about Perl 6, and hopefully they are cleaning up Perl. However, I agree with your assessment of Perl 5: a thousand ways to do the same thing each using their own exclusive exotic ascii character combinations.

One has to wonder about the relative success of Java, given its horrific performance and obscene installation complexity. However, ultimately Java's success comes down to the lack of choices in the language syntax and a strong networking library.

Of course Java syntax is a simplification of C++, while Perl's roots are in shell scripts.

I wish there was a shell with the simple grace of C, the libraries and idiot proof installing packages of Perl, and the portability of bash.

Yeah..more RegEx fragmentation

[Eol1]

#sarcasm# Yeah!!! Just what we need more RegEx fragmentation #/sarcasm#

Honestly, RegEx hasn't changed much since awk and when it did, Perl usually led the way. The changes though usually just added features or tweaks, my RegEx still basically looked the same though whether I used VIM, Python, ASP, C++, Perl, .

Shortly after reading the changes, I was aghast. Sure some of the changes make sense but some are going completely against RegEx as we know them now (getting rid of character classes for one []) . Sure you can use the p5 modifier or do the funky syntax to use [] but the issue is its a radical change.

This is a bad thing(tm). This is going to force all us RegEx people who currently using 4 or 5 different RegEx tools to not only learn minor differences based on each app, but we will be forcec to learn a COMPLETE DIFFERENT subset of RegEx syntax incompatible with anything else.

Now wait you say, Perl has always led the way and other tools seem to use perl compatable RegEx libraries. Not so with Perl6. Have floated this question out on a couple developer lists (PHP for one) and everybody is saying, Perl 6 RegEx support isn't going to happen. They are all happy with the current state of RegEx's. This is especially go to cause hell with PHP's perl_regex functions. PHP has stated they are not going to support Perl6 RegEx. Real perl_regex compatible then huh.

Some the Perl6 changes are pretty good for RegEx, but the complete drop of support for character clases just isn't a good thing (tm).

My 2cents (who is glad at least Larry added the P5 modifier)

Re:Yeah..more RegEx fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl 6 "reg"exs are not regular anymore (neither were Perl 5's of course...).
Perl 6 is now more of a concise parser builder. As Jaime Zawinski has pointed out,
regexes are not enough for real parsing, though people used Perl ones for ad-hoc parsing all the time.
The sweeping syntax changes are an indicator of the Perl folk mutating Perl to be better at what people actually use if for - by the looks of things, they'll even stop calling them
regexes soon, preferirng the term "rule"

makes me glad I'm cutting back on Perl

[g4dget]

I used to write a lot of Perl scripts and libraries. But I've been cutting back and using other scripting languages instead. Perl6 looks like it would not be a pleasant transition from Perl5; I don't want to have to learn a new, idiosyncratic language every major release. If some of the features in Perl6 turn out to be useful (like the new regex syntax), they will make it as libraries into other languages.

Perl Bashers

[mbrod]

Seems to be a lot of Perl bashers. Surprising.

Where I work Perl helps us with System Integration, fast scripting, production reports, database connectivity where speed of writing the application and flexibility in changing that application quickly are important, web sites for change control systems, bug reporting systems, etc. and much much more.

If speed of creating the application and flexibility of changing that application need to be blazingling fast Perl is the choice. If Perl is not going to provide the application speed you need then use C or C++. That is why Perl is written in C :-).

If the Perl code you are reading isn't readible it probably had to be written too fast for the programmer to accout for that or else the programmer simply didn't care. Perl is the most flexible language ever and it can be the most readible if some care is taken. Especially in a smaller size applications.

Perl is beautiful

[Ender Ryan]

I simply don't understand what is up with all the Perl bashing going on here. I think it is mostly a sign of ignorance, because most of the negative comments about Perl are simply false.

Many people say Perl is too big, has too many features, is too complicated, etc. This is simply false. Perl has tons of features, but, more than any other language I have ever used, you can use as little or as much of it as you want. You can pick up a Perl book and start writing Perl code in 15 minutes.

Perl is ugly, hard to read, "write only", etc. This is complete horseshit, probably stemming from lack of experience with using Perl. Perl is very easy to write and read. Where I work, I have a co-worker who is not a programer. He learned Pascal years ago, but did not do any real coding until recently. Despite this, he can fairly easily read and modify my code. Yet, he can't read or modify my C/C++ code at all, and it's usually very readable, very clean, simple and concise.

PHP/Python is better. A lot of people like to compare Perl to PHP and Python. Neither are "better", there really is no such thing. PHP is for web developers, and Perl can do everything PHP can do in nearly the exact same ways. Take a look at CPAN, there are so many Perl modules for use with Apache and web development in general that Perl is far, far more capable of a web programming language than PHP(IMO anyway). And Python, I've seen some absolutely fantastic stuff written in Python, but I hate Python, because it gives me a frickin headache. I cannot read/write Python, the lack of braces, indentation as syntax is just horrible on my eyes. Perhaps I'm slightly dyslexic or something, but when I'm looking at a page of Python code it all starts to swim and I cannot tell where each code block begins and ends.

Now don't get me wrong, Perl isn't perfect. There are some things that bother me about Perl 5. # for comments, not bad but I really wish I could use C and C++ style comments in my Perl code. A bunch of #'s just look rather ugly. Threads, Perl 6 will have decent thread support from what I understand, I wish Perl 5 did, luckily for me everything I use Perl for I can fairly easily use multiple proceses instead, still would be nice though.

I for one am looking forward to Perl 6. There will definately be a learning curve, but at least it will run most scripts without modification, will make upgrading much easier.

Oh wait... this is /., it's easier to get modded up for bashing something... ok... Microsoft sucks! ;-)