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.""

Comments

We're all going to die

[StuWho]

"But Perl also will remain a language with the diehard developer fans who are the impetus behind its popularity. "Personally, I'm hoping to get Parrot embedded into games and office suites," Sugalski said. "I for one would love to write my word processing macros and game scripts in Perl or Forth rather than in whatever hand-rolled language someone's come up with."

Back to Pac Man and Vi then...

Anyone who intimately knows 5

[devphaeton]

...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.

Re:Anyone who intimately knows 5

[smack_attack]

Learn 5, because it will probably take a few months until 6 is standard. Either way, in a few years you will look back on whatever you coded today and shake your head in shame. /used to printf() every line when he learned PHP

Why was Perl5 so Popular?

[use_compress]

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...

Too many cooks

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Hmmm

[Moth7]

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.

Quite possibly very naive question from a non-perl

[FatRatBastard]

user...

Is Parrot something akin to the JVM / .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?

If I'm reading all of this right Parrot may well become everything Sun wants Java to become / MS wants .NET to become without the "what are those bastards going to do to the platform" stench.

Of course, if I have the wrong end of the stick here I apologise. Perl isn't my strong suit.

Re:why rev a language ?

[furry_marmot]

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.

Ever heard of comments?

[cliveholloway]

They're great. They help you to remember and comprehend code you wrote a while back. If you start a line with a "#" you can follow it with a comment.

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 ;-)

Re:Perl: The Beginning

[perly-king-69]

well, this is quite proper and normal syntax:
s/(.*?\s+)\(.*?\)/$1/g
Looks like an explosion in the ascii factory to me!