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Exegesis 7 Released (Perl 6 Text Formatting)

Posted by michael on from the folding-spindling-mutilating dept.

chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Exegesis 7, Damian Conway's explanation of how text formatting will work Perl 6 (and now, Perl 5, thanks to his Perl6::Form module) will work. Think of it as Perl 1 for the 21st century. Also, Parrot 0.1.0, the virtual machine for Perl 6 and several other dynamic languages, released on Leap Day -- ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?"

11 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. The best thing about Perl by rgmoore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One thing that you really have to love about the people who write Perl is that they have a sense of humor. This kind of document could be extremely boring and bland, but Damian had the good sense to liven it up by using humorous examples, mostly drawn from Shakespeare. He's doing some great work, but he's also obviously having fun doing it.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    1. Re:The best thing about Perl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was lucky enough to be lectured by Damain Conway on the fundamentals of programming in C. Easily the best lecturer I have ever met. Of all the lectures in Computer Science he was the only one who managed to pack out the theatre everytime. I swear people came in just for the show.

      A great combination of humour, intensity and analogies created an enthusiasm to listen and in turn learn. He even spent long hours writing applications to demonstrate principles (think virtual C intepreter with GUI).

      Whats more he loved to teach, he wasnt just there to complete his hours required like most lecturers.

      I wish we could find more people as talented as Damian to teach us. The world would be much smarter if we could.

  2. Uh... by double-oh+three · · Score: 5, Funny

    "ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?"

    Uh... I gotta say... No.

    --
    "For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
  3. A guy walks into his coworker's office.... by Shut+the+fuck+up! · · Score: 5, Funny

    The screen is covered with what looks like a still shot
    of a copy of "The Matrix" screen saver.

    He looks at it a minute, and realizes that the coworker
    is reading it, so it can't be a screen saver.

    He thinks about it a second, and then asks "Do you always
    ready your email fully encrypted with PGP like that?
    Decoding PGP in you head like that is _really_ impressive!".

    "No," says the coworker, "that's just a Perl script I'm
    working on".

  4. Have you ever wanted to... NO! I HAVEN'T! by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    > ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?"

    Y'know, that couldn't be ANY MORE WRONG than an HTML rendering of a .GIF of a psychotic nun in a bondage outfit clubbing a baby seal to death with an Al Gore doll.

    (With apologies to the denizen of the Monastery, from whom I stole the idea.)

  5. C++ is object oriented high level assembler by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have always thought of C as high level assembler, and C++ as object oriented high level assembler.

    1. Re:C++ is object oriented high level assembler by grub · · Score: 5, Funny

      Olde Quote:
      C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung.
      --
      Trolling is a art,
  6. Re:I tried, but I failed by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    If you like Python, check out Ruby. I've been monkeying around with it at work for small things. It's like Perl but readable.. and object oriented from the ground up.. and easy to work with.. hmm, on second thought, it's nothing like Perl.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  7. Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me by Fortunato_NC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One of the reasons I love Perl (cut my teeth with Perl 4, now write a lot of Perl 5 code) is that it is a virtual swiss army knife of programming languages. There is a lot of power in there, but you can choose to use only as much as you might need. The "TMTOWTDI" ethos also appeals to me. And, in reading the updates on Perl.com, I see that this exact same spirit is going into the creation of Perl 6.

    So why am I worried? Well, it feels like Larry saw Microsoft's .NET announcements and said, "Hmmm...multiple programming languages that all compile down to the same bytecode and execute in the same virtual machine...sounds like a reasonable idea to me!" The Parrot VM is a neat idea, that goes even further than .NET since it's multi-platform, and definitely will be very nice when it's finished. But I feel like it's going to delay Perl 6. And as nice as Perl 5 is, languages like Python and PHP are beginning to surpass it in feature set and ease of use. I don't want Perl 6 to be irrelevant when it finally shows up.

    Also, like a very impatient, immature kid on December 23, I want my Perl 6 now, damnit!

    But, I trust the Perl 6 team. They're smart people. Read the newsgroups and the forums, and you'll agree. When Perl 6 and Parrot are ready for prime-time, I am pretty sure that I won't be looking over at Python and PHP and feeling guilty anymore.

    Ah well, back to coding...

    --
    Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
  8. Re:Agreed, this may just be too much, too late by TimToady · · Score: 5, Informative
    I recommend they just wrap up whatever concepts they have now and start moving toward an alpha.
    Which is precisely what we've been doing for some time now. Apocalypse 12 will be out very shortly, and it will look like a lot of new concepts, but they're mostly concepts we've been aiming at for a long time now. Get this through your noggin--it's not the conceptualizing that's the hard part. The "wrapping up" is where almost all the effort goes, because that's where the hard work of design is. Anybody can come up with a list of new features. We've had the RFCs for three years, and you know what a mess they were...
  9. Re:Python/PERL users unite! by ajs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No one is joking on the Parrot side. Check out the Pie-Thon

    Parrot will run Python before it runs Perl, *that* should demonstrate how commited Parrot is to not just being Perl 6's back-end.

    You'll be able to create a class in Python as a sub-class of a Perl 6 class which further derives from a Ruby class, and then call a method on such an object which is defined all the way up in Ruby.... no problemo. Parrot is going to change the way we choose programming languages for the tasks at hand....