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

The Perl 6 VM is Parrot

[YA_Python_dev]

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!

Re:Full article text

[gowen]

you have to buy the magazine to get the full text...

And yet you felt the need to copy and paste the bit they gave you, and title it "Full Article Text".

You sir, are a cretin.

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.

Grammatical mutability...

[Dystopian Rebel]

This lets different kinds of grammatical mutability sneak into the language, and lets people experiment with different syntaxes and different ways of attaching those syntaxes to new kinds of semantics.

Translation: "Perl 6 code will be the most unreadable Perl ever."

Re:Grammatical mutability...

[code65536]

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.

Cover Quote

[holdp]

The dead tree version had on the cover a very Larryish
quote - (roughly) We have 80% of Perl6 done and we are now working on the next 80%.

it's the community

[SmallOak]

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.

Re:Isn't Duke Nukem Forever coded in Perl 6?

[chromatic]

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.