Perl Features of the Future - Part 1

Kevin writes "This story highlights some of the features being included in Perl 6. "There will be substantial changes in the move from Perl 5 to Perl 6. We've been hamstrung for a while by the need to maintain backward compatibility all the way back to Perl 1. There are some things we want to remove, because they seemed like good ideas when they were introduced but they're more trouble than [they're worth] now."

Comments

Perl 6 is a mistake

[keesh]

I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, 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. Recently I've started using Ruby as well, and I intend to move my department over to it instead of wasting time with Perl 6.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. 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. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. 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 (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this . Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

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. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

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, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but BSD^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Re:Goodbye "my", hello UTF-8?

[orthogonal]

If not for "my", what else would you use to declare variables?

By prefacing the variable name wiith the type:
int foo ;

Oh.

Oh, wait, it's perl. No types!

"int foo;" plus some line noise probably implements DeCSS. Or does an rm -f. Who knows? Hey, it's perl. It's not like you can read it.