Slashdot Mirror
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.
PERL is dying, just like BSD. That is why no one is posting on this thread.
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 ^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.
Wouldn't you instead need to see the cover to determine that?
"it hardly looks like a valid replacement for Llama or Camel books"
..." is a discussion and tutorial on a topic, intended for beginners ..." is the same, but for intermediate and advanced users
It's not supposed to be. Just as they have conventions for the books' color (e.g. Perl blue), O'Reilly and Associates has conventions for the titles.
* "... Essentials" means an overview of what's new.
* "Learning
* "Programming
* "... Cookbook" is a series of problems and their solutions
* "... in a Nutshell" is like a language reference
* "...: The Definitive Guide" is a combination of all four
* "... Pocket Reference" is a shorter version of the above
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
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.
A "design mistake" would be something error-prone and impossible to fix, like Python using indentation as part of the syntax.
No, it's more like "show how the cart is being designed so you can help build it and/or begin to use it with the perl6ish pragma in perl5".
Mark Erikson
is there...
-- search the web
OOP hasn't been decided yet. That's the next Apocalypse the design team is considering. Just about everything known about Perl syntax is in chapter 4.
There are also plenty of people who'll program Parrot or IMCC bytecodes. We're the people who are implementing Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Lua, BASIC, BF, Befunge, Scheme, Jako, Cola, Perl 5, and Perl 1 on Parrot.
If you're expecting this to be a new verison of the Camel or the Llama, you'll be disappointed. It's not. It's aimed at early adopters, people who are curious about the state of the project, and people who are interested in developing Perl 6, Parrot, or another language on top of Parrot.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
That's the problem, though. There's no such thing as "standard" tabs.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
And if Allison doesn't post in this thread, it's not because she's thinking "great, men are finally noticing women's bodies and commenting publicly on them". It's because she's off working on open source.
If anyone wants to talk to me about this at OSCON, I'd be happy to explain more forcefully just how much this coward's comment pisses me off.
--Nat