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First Perl 6 Book is Out
prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Publishing presented Perl 6 Essentials, the first book to be dedicated to Perl 6, at the beginning of this month. Looking at the table of contents, it hardly looks like a valid replacement for Llama or Camel books. Chapter 1 is available online. The whole book is available to Safari subscribers." I'm sure we'll review it sooner or later.
>> Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal [lysator.liu.se] 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.
The reason for this is because if you tell the interpreter what sort of data it is, it helps the interpreter do more optimizations with that data. Sure, it's not truly an integer, but at least you're helping the interpreter out but telling it how it can deal with the data.
>> Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions.
Of course, there is a lot of features in Perl. 200 ways to do one thing (which couldnt be considered a bad thing), but it's actually really cool, because it lets you stick to your own style more than other languages. Face it, perl should not be used unless you know what you are doing with it. It can get ugly, but it's powerful and can do certain tasks amazingly well, and better than any other language.
Sure, it's bloated.. but the way it's being designed should make it so the bloat doesn't affect the speed or power.
And you won't truly be able to appreciate Perl (especially 6), until you learn all the shortcuts [features] (not all, but..) . There is a lot to learn about the language before utilizing it's full power, but once you master it (if possible with perl), it becomes really fun.
That's not a "design mistake", it's just a major feature that hasn't been added yet. This will be remedied in a future version of Ruby.
First, it hardly matters whether it is "just" a design mistake or a missing feature. If he needs the feature and it isn't available, he can't use the language. Second, Unicode tends to have all kinds of implications deep into the implementation of a language. They touch reflection, language syntax, regular expressions, file system, pickling, I/O etc. You can call it "just" a "missing feature" but it is one big feature. I would be surprised if Ruby got proper (i.e. integrated) Unicode support before the pretty major rewrite that will also add native threads.
A "design mistake" would be something error-prone and impossible to fix, like Python using indentation as part of the syntax.
Yeah, many people who have not tried it say that. Turns out that it is less error-prone because it eliminates a whole class of bugs that result from parens that do not follow the indentation.
From the abstract it is clear that this book is intended to describe the Perl 6 project including the reasons for rewriting the language, the desing philosophy, some of the roadblocks along the way, etc. It sounds like a real interesting read for those who are interested in the process of designing and implementing a full scale computer language, regardless of how you feel about the particular results.