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Larry Wall on Perl 6

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-it-would-make-sense-that-he-talks-about-that dept.

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."

3 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. 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.

  3. 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.

    --
    how to invest, a novice's guide