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

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

[Kailden]

I agree.

I think every computer scientist worth thier pay should realize that language advocacy stinks. Every language has its niche--a reason for why some guy sat back and said, "I need to write a shortcut language to do this" or "wouldn't it be great if I could have a better correlation between the way I think/design and the language I write in" and it evolves from there. Perl was designed as a glue language heavily modeled after awk/sed and other unix tools and the concept of following natural language and "having more than one way to do/say it" so you need to have a good feel for the language pieces as you do when you become a master of english and understand different connotations and methods of stating something.

That being said, it is unfortunate that because there are large groups of people who either A) get religious about the language they choose or B) choose not to learn other languages to a point of knowing thier true niche we take every language and bloat it out and take it out of its scope. And in turn that makes it that much harder to grasp each new languages niche because you have to sort through a bunch of crap that trys to make every language the universal language.

Well, it's human nature I guess. Easy to point out as a problem but not easy to fix...but remember that the next time you are about to tell your coworker that they should "write that in _____" instead of answering thier question. Or, be careful when you complain that "____ is bloated or is too hard to understand" because you are just adding fuel to the fire my friend. It is better by far to state why you chose a certain language on a certain project than to be a universal advocate of "_____".

Advocacy is a clear mark of inexperience.