Ask Larry Wall

About what? Perl is probably a good topic choice. No one knows more about Perl than Larry Wall, right? We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Larry by email, and post his answers when we get them back. Note: Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly. Please be aware of this if you include code samples in your question.

Comments

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[legLess]

Yowza. Blockquothe the Scareduck:

The regexp changes you're talking about in Apocalypse 5 [perl.com] will make Perl 6 deeply incompatible with existing scripts and practice. ...Something this radical and wrong will hurt Perl 6 adoption and will retard the acceptance of some very nifty features.

First of all, in case you missed it, one of the explicit design goals of Perl 6 is to run Perl 5 code perfectly and with no changes. If you don't want to use Perl 6 features - don't. End of story.

This makes your pithy Issawi quote pointless. Larry's not pushing the Perl mule, he's giving riders a choice of a new, different mule that many of them will like better. If you feel pushed - again, keep writing Perl 5.

Larry's said several times that he's going to break everything that needs to be broken, mercilessly, in the design of Perl 6. Only those to whom this appeals need come along for the ride. I think your hysteria is misplaced.