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Perl's Extreme Makeover
PurdueGraphicsMan writes "There's an article over at Yahoo! about the upcoming version of Perl (version 6) and some of the new features (RFC list). From the article: "Although Perl 5's expressions are the most sophisticated available and aspired to by other programming languages, "no one pretends for a moment that they're anything but hideously ugly," said Damian Conway, a core Perl developer and associate professor at Monash University in Australia.""
Back to Pac Man and Vi then...
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
...would be able to tell me if i should
a) start learning 5 anyways
or
b) wait till 6 is released, because going from barely having a grasp on 5 and then trying to learn 6 would just confuse myself?
i realise that all the perl5 code in the world won't suddenly cease function the minute perl6 is released, but still..
I can see the value in perl, and what a great tool it is, but for some reason i have a hard time wrapping my lil brain around it. It's a bit less "structured" or "consistent" than say C is. I suppose it has to be that way in order to do what it does, though.
do() || do_not();
With such bloated and obscure syntax in both the language and regular expressions, why do you think Perl 5 has become so popular? Once you've written a few programs in it, it is ULTRA EASY, ULTRA FAST and not hard to remember. An experienced Perl programmer could probablyl do almost any text processing task in a third of what it would take an expert C++ programmer to do. All of the bloat and lack of orthogonality and "bad design" paradoxically makes Perl 5 a fantastic language to program. I hope Wall doesn't mess this up...
While no one would ever accuse Perl of being single minded and focused, until Perl5 it was a fairly coherent language.
I understand that Perl6 is supposedly an evolution of the language, but there are so many suggestions for so many features and changes that the language itself seems to suffer from the too many cooks problem. With everyone and their brother suggesting features, the language itself becomes a mish mash of these features without a central theme tying it all together. Even if you said that DWIM was the central theme, can you really justify that when WIM is not what the language does because the feature that I'm using was designed by someone who had a completely different idea of what he meant?
In the past Perl has added functionality that was useful and you can see where the language has its partitions. Base Perl (datatypes, simple arithmetic, simple string manipulation), nested datastructures, regexes, OO, and so on. While admittedly a mess, each addition to the language brought more power and ease. Perl6, OTOH, seems to be adding feature after feature without regard to whether it makes the language easier to use, only more powerful.
So you end up with a new interpreter that won't run your old scripts without modifying the scripts. At the very least it should automatically default to Perl5 syntax unless otherwise told to use Perl6 syntax. Unfortunately, in the push to evolve, Larry and Damian (and the rest of the lunatics) have foregone automatic backwards compatibility.
I'll probably migrate, but not for a while.
I have been pwned because my
IIRC it's possible to write OpenOffice macros in Perl (Though it probably takes some nasty hacked API to do it). And of course, given how easy it is to embed a Perl interpretter into C apps (possibly moreso with Parrot) then there's really no reason why it can't be used for game scripts.
user...
.NET runtime engine? If so is the plan for it to be as robust as the JVM / .NET runtime: i.e. could the same type of applications that people are building for Java / .NET be just as easily built with Parrot?
.NET to become without the "what are those bastards going to do to the platform" stench.
Is Parrot something akin to the JVM /
If I'm reading all of this right Parrot may well become everything Sun wants Java to become / MS wants
Of course, if I have the wrong end of the stick here I apologise. Perl isn't my strong suit.
Because it's a high-level language with lots of sytactic sugar that made a whole new level of flexibility in programming. You can be loose, sloppy, tight, properly formatted, or write one-liners with equal ease.
I agree with the main topic that other languages aspired to its expressiveness. The problem, from the point of view of a Perl hacker like me, is that some of them have actually outdone it, primarily by creating similar power, expressiveness, and simplicity but without being so ugly *and* being OO. Ruby and Python are pretty much the motivators for the upgrade.
Heh. Still, it's worth noting that this isn't new to Perl 6. Perl's always been a Chimera. Quoth the Perl man page (as it has as long as I can remember), "Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people famil- iar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some ves- tiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)" As for why being a freakish blend and a giant mess is actually a feature, I suggest checking out Larry Wall's Second State of the Onion. (It's a long page, but the stuff on the advantages of complexity is all near the top.)
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Oh, and just to keep on subject:
SNOBOL is considered to be the parent of unix regexpressions and awk which led to Perl. Unfortunately, the children inherited a much castrated version of snobol's string manipulation capabilities which have only now been reasonably addressed in perl6.
If nothing else, I suggest that people interested in the history of pattern matching take a good look at snobol.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If you're looking at code *you wrote* for over an hour without understanding it, you only have yourself to blame. Unless you're coding in brainfuck, I suppose.
tch
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
well, this is quite proper and normal syntax:
s/(.*?\s+)\(.*?\)/$1/g
Looks like an explosion in the ascii factory to me!
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