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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."
I like that.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Ahem! There is a difference between syntactical messiness and semantic messiness. Perl is very ugly syntactically, but I've found it so very beautiful semantically, and its fluidity is exactly what makes Perl so perfect: it allows the fusion of functional (e.g., Lisp-like), imperative (e.g., C-like), and OO paradigms of programming. While many languages fuse the latter two (like C++), few are able to successfully fuse in the first (with things like functions being first-class expressions and something similar to an equivalence of statements and expressions) (and no, just because Python has "lambda" doesn't make it more Lisp-like in the broad picture--in fact, they are even thinking about retreating from that--grrr).
If someone feels that using the full scope of Perl results in messiness, they aren't forced by any means to use that full scope. There are many Perl coders who limit themselves to the "C subset" of Perl. But unlike certain other unnamed languages, Perl doesn't try to play the role of parent in telling you what you can and can't express so those who are more comfortable with a wider breadth of linguistic forms can take advantage of that and make code that is, in a word, elegant.
As for the syntactical ugliness (the $, @, %, etc.) that most people are referring to when they say that Perl is ugly... well, you learn to live with that pretty early on. But beneath that superficial ugliness lies a sparkling beautiful language.
> I made it to page 149 where it says "Python uses the indentation of statements under a header to group the statements in a nested block."
> I stopped reading and tossed the book on my bookshelf on a shelf full of unused & unloved technical manuals.
One of the best things a programmer can do is try different languages. Try lisp, sql, haskell. Play with xml and yaml. Compare J2EE to Ruby on Rails. Try a language that doesn't use ALGOL-inherited code blocks. Just like an 80s ACM article said, the single best way to evaluate a programmer is by the number of languages they're fluent in.
At the end of the day Python's indentation causes a few programs, but seems to solve more. It makes it hard to share source code via email. It rules out the use of tabs. I can live with those limits. On the flip side it helps reinforce readable code. That's a very good thing - and consistent with the fundamental philosophy of the lanuage: the code must be easy to maintain.
But if you really can't get your head around that, then try Ruby. Like Python it's a well-designed, easily maintained language with a great community and future.