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Perl 6: Apocalypse 6 Released
data64 writes "The latest Apocalypse talks about subroutines. Looks like we finally get type signatures which are way more powerful than the rudimentary prototypes available with Perl5."
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The VM is showing 10x speed improvements in preliminary tests. Couple that in with Moore's law and Perl (or any languages that compiles to the Parrot VM) becomes a very attractive language for more types of problems.
Perl has always had a lot of esoterica. Don't let it bog you down. You can be amazingly productive in perl without ever knowing what a typeglob is.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
This will make Perl an attractive contender for serious application development; something which it came reasonably close to in late Perl5 but didn't quite get there because while you could do most things in a consensually "proper" way, the roll-your-own methodology just wasn't convincing enough for pointy haired project managers.
The primary difference with Perl6 is that it will have full support for strict(ish) typing and object orientation which makes it suitable for large projects where it's impractical to expect programmer A to know anything about how programmer Z's module is implemented internally and vice versa.
The new feature set (together with Perl's availability on a wide range of platforms and the huge range of freely available interfaces on CPAN) means that Java and .NET will be facing some stiff competition in just about every conceivable application niche.
If the speed improvements are genuine then (assuming that one were in a position to choose) for probably the first time ever we will be in a position where there is hardly any real need to maintain skills in multiple languages as Perl will be at least adequate for the vast majority of implementations. It's not unreasonable to suppose the list of exclusions being limited to CPU bound code in high-performance content servers (eg RDBMS, HTTP) and real-time and embedded apps requiring hand-coded assembler or at least tightly optimised C.
Whether you agree with that or recoil in horror at the thought of your favourite language being marginalised, Perl is clearly not just a "glue" language any more. It's about to become a fully-fledged enterprise application development platform.
I'm sure you've already guessed, but for the record I am very much looking forward to this.
There is one fly in the ointment I guess. Perl, like C, is very free-form in terms of what it lets you do but the flip side of that coin is that such languages also let you write dangerously unstructured and unmaintainable code. They require good training and a degree of self discipline to use well. Self taught programmers who didn't have strict typing and nested scoping enforced on them at the beginning of their coding career almost inevitably tend to grow up writing code that is less secure and harder to read than do those who learned back in their college days to associate variable declaration at the wrong level of scope with lower assignment grades and some stern finger wagging from their tutor.
The new Perl will continue to make the impossible possible and the merely hard very easy, but for the first time it will provide support for a more formal structure where that is considered a good thing.
Remember though that Perl is still very much a grassroots phenomenon. Whether this hits anybody's radar screen out in the real world has to depend on how well and how rapidly it is taken up by the Perl community. i.e. upon the willingness of existing Perl code monkeys to grab the inevitable (presumably three-humped) Camel Book, learn the new features and use them deliberately to adopt a more structured and more scalable coding style.
It's on this point I think that Perl6 will succeed or fail. We will need plenty of real world examples out there so that new users have something from which to learn righteous coding principles, and so that sceptical project managers will see successful implentations from which to draw confidence and inspiration.
One problem with Perl, is that it's very hard to read somebody else's Perl code. Most Perl hackers can write scripts that do amazing things in much less space/time than a traditional compiled language, but their code is indecipherable to even other skilled Perl hackers. If you've ever maintained a large Perl program written by someone other than yourself, you know what I'm talking about.
Adding more features to the language will only make this problem worse. Very few Perl programmers know more than a fraction of Perl's syntax. More syntax means more stuff that your average Perl programmer doesn't understand! This is a huge impediment to writing a large project in Perl.
Languages like C and Java stay alive precisely because they're not very expressive. You can write huge behemoth-sized projects and still have some hope of maintaining them, because there just aren't that many ways to obfuscate the code.