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."

Comments

Hard Enough to Understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to debate the fact that Perl is an immensely powerful language. It can do an amazing amount of stuff...but I'm worried about giving the programmer control over the actual grammar of the language itself. It seems that that will cause some of the same issues that C macros can cause (which is why Java doesn't include them), in terms of making the code just next to impossible to follow. Perl is hard enough to maintain with how obfuscated it can get. I'm not sure this is going to help.

Parrot more interesting than Perl 6

[porkThreeWays]

For as long as I've been following Perl 6, I've felt Parrot is more interesting than Perl 6 itself. Parrot is in many ways like .net (obviously there are many internal differences, but the idea is the same). Compile to a common bytecode that a virtual machine understands. This is interesting because it already supports (albeit incompletely) more languages than .Net and is a whole hell of a lot newer. I think Parrot is going to get the attention of a great chunk of languages haven't really considered using a VM before. We could see the age of 3 common bytecodes in practice. Java VM (whatever it's called), .Net, and Parrot. Maybe one day instead of seeing "Ruby 1.8 or greater required" we'll see "Parrot X.X or greater required". It'd be nice if we actually saw the day of the Parrot VM browser plugin or (pipedream) Windows coming with the parrot VM.

Re:Wow

[j-pimp]

And the George W. Bush award for using 9/11 as an explanation for something completely unrelated to 9/11 goes to .... Larry Wall.

I don't know about nationally, but there was a major recession in the NY area after 9/11 for a good year and a half. I was stuck workign at burger king at one point. Granted, I choose the worse time to drop out of college, it was even hard for a high school graduate with some college and a solid skillset at the time for entry level IT work to get a minimum wage service job.

The company I work for now is an ISP/developmenthouse. They are based out in eastern longisland 36.9 miles from my house in Queens according to google. There business core was out east. They had inroads and a solid plan to break into Manhattan, but they were, and still are a longisland company. Before september 11th they were looking at adding phone lines. Afterwards, the phones stopped ringing. There development work almost stopped. They had to lay off several people.

Anyway, claiming September 11th had a negative aspect on the business of computer book publishing is far from unbased.