Slashdot Mirror
Apocalypse 12 From Larry Wall
rheum101 writes "Larry Wall just released the eagerly anticipated Apocalypse12 . detailing Perl6 OO in all it glories. To quote the author -> 'One other note: if you haven't read the previous Apocalypses and Exegeses, a lot of this is going to be complete gobbledygook to you. (Of course, even if you have read them, this might still be gobbledygook. You take your chances in life...).'"
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.
In the name of the entire Slashdot community, I would like to thank Larry Wall for the absolutely amazing work he is doing. Thanks Larry! There are many people working very hard to make our dream come true and give us the most innovative and cutting-edge programming language in existance, which Perl 6 is soon going to be. It would not be possible without all of the Perl 6 and Parrot contributors. Please let us also not forget about brave people who still actively maintain Perl 5 and will keep doing it even after Perl 6 is ready. The Ponie project shows us that Perl 5 is not going away. The work of all of those people is invaluable. And this is all to give us free software development platform of the 21st century, while uniting Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Ook, Forth, Befunge, BASIC and many other languages thanks to Parrot, finally allowing them all to seamlessly work together and ending the flame wars between them. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Yay! I absolutely _hate_ having to have an extra set of braces around everything in an entire file. I have always enjoyed the way packages, and now clases, in perl are scoped.
I know, seems like such a tiny thing, but dammit, I like to be able to go a bit further before hitting the right margin :) Especially in a language like Perl, with such compact code, lines tend to be pretty long sometimes.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
JVM is not exactly language-independent. It is not very well suited for dynamically typed languages such as Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Python and in fact even for languages like Lisp and Scheme. Thought, with few exceptions like immutable strings or some uninheritable base classes, JVM is quite a nice environment for statically typed languages with simple single-inheritance object models like Java.
The Microsoft .Net on the other hand is not very
platform-independent and I don't think it ever will be,
while still supporting mostly statically typed languages.
Besides, it didn't even exist
at the beginning of Parrot project...
In any case, none of them runs Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Lisp and Scheme which I was talking about. So yes, Parrot is in fact totally unlike anything anyone has done before. Very true.
There is no such a thing as slow language. The only way in which a language per se can be slow is the parsing time. Of course Perl 6 having unprecedentedly rich (and even self-modifying) syntax will always be much harder to parse than Lisp which is basically a manually written parsed tree. However, you will always be able to compile it once and store Parrot bytecode or native binary. Even without compiling it to a native binary, there is JIT engine which can run critical parts of the bytecode as single assembly instructions on harware registers if you give enough hints to the compiler. See the files in parrot/jit directory in the CVS. It is really worth reading.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
> As a sidenote I might add that Perl 6 will support the functional paradigm.
Perl5 supports *portions* of it already. closures are already fully supported,
as well as list-transformation functions. I suppose you meant that Perl6 will
widen its support so that it can handle full-blown FP with continuations and
the whole works, which matches what I've heard.
> It is just not the only paradigm it will support.
Heckno. Perl will always support contextual programming and imperative
programming; object-oriented programming and functional programming are
both getting huge boosts in Perl6, and there's talk of logical/declarative
paradigm stuff slipping in e.g. from Prolog. Perl is fundamentally a
multiparadigmatic language; you can use whichever paradigm is the best fit
for the problem space of your program, and you can freely mix and match the
paradigms at will, which I do. It's often convenient, for example, to have
an object method accept as one of its arguments a coderef (e.g. to use as
a callback), which can be a closure. Going the other way, a closure (or a
set of related closures) can retain objects and use them to do stuff. I
do this stuff today in Perl5. With Perl, you get the best parts of all
paradigms. This will be even more true in Perl6, which is getting both
real objects *and* continuations, among other things. The support for
contextual programming is also being beefed up; a routine will be able to
return an object that knows how to return one value in numeric context,
another value in string context, and so on. (My personal favourite
four-word quote from the Apocalypse series so far is "interesting values
of undef". If you don't know why this is awesome, you do not yet fully
grok the contextual programming paradigm.)
And yeah, Haskell is more innovative than pragmatic. The innovative things
about Perl are three: context, the CPAN, and assimilation. Assimilation
in this context means that the Perl dev team actively hunts down other
languages and incorporates their nifty features into Perl. There's been a
lot of talk about Smalltalk and Haskell on perl6-language, for example.
One could argue that another way to say this is, "Perl prefers to let other
languages do its innovation for it." But it seems to be a pretty good model.
None of the other languages seem to have all of the nifty features that Perl
has together in one language.
Context IMO is the most innovative thing about Perl. The CPAN also rocks.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.