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Larry Wall on Perl 6

Nate writes "Linux Format magazine has an interview with Larry Wall, the eccentric linguist and coder behind Perl. Larry discusses some of the new Perl 6 features ready to rock the world, and if you're not planning to move from Perl 5.8, he has a few musings on that too."

12 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. The Perl 6 VM is Parrot by YA_Python_dev · · Score: 5, Informative

    The virtual machine that will run Perl 6 is Parrot, an innovative register-based JITed VM optimized for dynamic languages.
    It can also run a subset of Python (compiled with Pirate), Ruby, Tcl, brainf*ck, Ook!, Common LISP, BASIC, Lua, m4 and a few others, all of which are more or less incomplete.

    More details on the Parrot site and the Wikipedia page on the Parrot VM.

    If you like that sort of things, you can help!

    --
    There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
  2. Re:About Larry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Karma Whore... are you just riding the daypass wagon?
    Your earlier comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171673&cid=142 97763

    I can do wikipedia searches myself, thank you
      actually
    add in a bookmark with keyword W
    and list this:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.o rg %s&btnI=%22I'm Feeling Lucky%22

    then just type in \ w larry wall \ w perl \ w whtatever \ etc...

    it will do a google i'm lucky search on en.wikipedia and bring you to the right page. Beat's wikipedia's search. Even detects misspellings

  3. Re:Perl is a trainwreck - retire it by musterion · · Score: 2, Informative

    I hope everyone reads this post entirely. It is obvious satire. It would be a troll if you don't read it all.

  4. it's the community by SmallOak · · Score: 5, Informative


    I think one of the strength of Perl is a very active community and, dare I say it, they are nice bunch of people.

    I have been to two Perl YAPC and found the people very helpful and very welcoming to people with limited programming background like myself.

    The other big strength of Perl is CPAN, it's like a huge store for free. I used the CPAN shell a lot at one point and I was very pleased in the way it resolved dependencies. IN general I found the documentation for the CPAN Libraries I was using very good. Your mileage may vary. Sitll I found that creating your own Classes is a bit more work than in some other languages.

    I worked on a big project that was pretty much all in Perl. How did they do it? Good old fashion project discipline. They set coding style rules (programming and indentation), Perl's Perldoc for documenting, good versioning, and object naming conventions.

  5. Re:Parrot more interesting than Perl 6 by Jaykul · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is interesting because it already supports (albeit incompletely) more languages than .Net and is a whole hell of a lot newer

    I'm all for another multi-language VM, especially if it's built from the ground up for dynamic typing, but you're joking about the languages, right?

    I count 33 Parrot Languages (including duplicates) but only 15 that have ANY tests (even ones that fail).

    Of all the lists that I checked, the only one that short was the one for the Mono Project (and they list 13)...

    I mean, it's certainly fair to claim that Parrot is newer, if by newer you mean "still not done" (at the current rate, we might see .NET 3 before Parrot 1.0), or "released a beta most recently" (0.4 came out JUST after .NET 2 went gold). But to say it has more languages is just ignorant.

    --
    Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one. -- Benjamin Franklin
  6. Then use perl persistently... by Etcetera · · Score: 2, Informative


    Perl is compiled every time you run a Perl program. It causes an annoying slowdown in my programs.

    It doesn't have to be... you should look into SpeedyCGI/PersistentPerl or even PPerl. I use the former for various web cgi's that are hit constantly (including one framework where all hits are rewritten to execute a single index.pl script) as well as for various scripts that need to execute very quickly as part of a qmail/vpopmail shell chain.

    As long as it's already use strict compliant, neither of these options require any changes to your code (unlike mod_perl), but should give you a significant increase in speed... for exactly the reason you specified.

    In fact, when you remove compilation from the equation, I've seen well-written perl code that executes faster than almost any other language... (your opcodes are basically boiling down to C anyway).

    Of course for CGI-only usage you can use mod_perl, but that does bring in some added complexity. The solutions above work from the command line as well, and require nothing more than a shebang line change.

  7. Re:Perl 6 for serious projects? by Lost+Found · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perl 6 is currently a serious development project. But since you must ask, check out the first CMS written in Perl 6:

    http://search.cpan.org/~brentdax/WWW-Kontent-0.01/ WWW/Kontent.pm

  8. Re:Parrot more interesting than Perl 6 by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think the main thing that sets .net apart is not so much language support, but the rich software library which is conveniently accessable from *any* of those languages.

    You do realize that the goal of Parrot is to allow exactly that, right? So a Python programmer could, conceivable, leverage modules from C6PAN, or vice versa. But, like .NET, whether this will work in practice remains to be seen.

  9. Re:how will extensions work? by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Umm... that already exists in the form of Parrot's NCI, or Native Call Interface. It's been used to bind, among other things, SDL to Parrot.

  10. Plagiarism much? by daVinci1980 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You know, if you're going to steal an article, verbatim, from wikipedia.org, the least you could do is cite a reference to it.

    But in the future, maybe you should just post a link to the article instead.

    -1, Plagiarised for you.

    --
    I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
  11. Re:Isn't Duke Nukem Forever coded in Perl 6? by chromatic · · Score: 5, Informative
    Perl 6 has got to be the vaporiest vaporware out there, almost.

    Funny, I have working Perl 6 code.

    The development on this thing has been going on forever.

    Like the C programming language or Java or C++ or Python 3000 or Ruby or PHP or....

    Six really is going to be the horse developed by committee.

    What does that even mean? Is Larry a committee now? (Yes, I know about @Larry. That doesn't make a meaningless cliche mean anything.)

    How much of the stuff in there was cool back in '00 really matters now?

    Off the top of my head, cleaner syntax, better consistency, improved FFI, more powerful grammars, multi-methods, improved OO, a better VM, true garbage collection, better speed, currying, optional type inference, hyperoperators, junctions, improved reflection, integration of regular expressions and tree transformations, role-based typing, better distribution options, JIT, true macros, and built-in set operations matter. I probably missed a few.

  12. Re:Real hackers use Python. by Coryoth · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think you need to invest some time in learning block shifting commands. In Emacs under Python mode that would be python-shift-left and python-shift-right, conveniently bound to Ctrl-c < and Ctrl-c >; that will collectively shift the selected text one indent level left or right, preserving indentation within the selection. Any other editor worth using has similar commands. To move code around for refactoring just cut and paste then shift the whole block you cut and paste left or right to the appropriate indentation level. Simple, easy, and efficient.

    Jedidiah.