Slashdot Mirror
What is Perl 6?
chromatic writes "Perl.com has a new article entitled What is Perl 6?. It analyzes the changes to the language in light of the good and bad points of Perl 5 and provides new information about the current state of the project: Perl 6 exists, you can write code in it today, and it's more consistent and easier to use than Perl 5."
What makes Perl strong, in my opinion, is the community's interest in maintaining a large and well-tested library of useful code in CPAN. Without CPAN, it's not clear that Perl would be as alive and healthy as it is today.
What Perl 6 offers is a rejuvenation of the language. Perl 5 still works great (better than ever due to new efforts to stamp out even the most obscure bugs) but this new revision is attracting some *really* smart people who are bringing interesting new ideas to the language. Audrey Tang and Luke Palmer come to mind right away.
My greatest hope, however, is not that a revitalized Perl will squash the other dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, ECMAScript, etc) but will instead bring them into a state of interoperability. I really, really want Parrot to succeed so well that the other languages decide to target it as a backend so I can trivially call Python or C libraries from Perl and vice versa.
Three years ago, I could program in C, but had never used a scripting language (except bash, for very basic stuff). I needed to do some non-trivial manipulation of text files and figured that this was a good time to learn. Since others in the group were using perl, I tried perl.
I knew what I wanted to do, but needed to learn the language. I struggled with the awful syntax for three days. The breaking point came when I wanted a list of lists and realised that Perl "flattens" nested lists. How do you write nested lists such as [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]? In Python, it's trivial (that's how you'd write it), but in perl, nobody I talked to could give me an answer. It flattens it, unasked, to [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and, try as I might, I can't see the point. (It turns out it's possible to have nested lists, but it's yet another example of perl's horrendous syntax).
Finally, I decided to give python a try. I spent an hour reading the python tutorial, and in another three hours, I had reimplemented everything I'd done in the last three days in perl, and an hour after that I'd finished the job. Python syntax was, and still is, the cleanest I've ever seen. It's an amazing language. And it changed the way I think about programming: it gave me an appreciation of functional methods (I now use ocaml a lot) and also changed the way I write C (vastly for the better).
That was it. No more perl for me.
People in the mid-1990s spoke of "overnight obsolescence", that Perl 6 would replace everything in a few weeks, and that you had better learn a new programming language every month. Over 10 years later, perl 6 is still in beta mode.
But if you need to do a longer project, pick up Programming Perl and read it (from front to end). Without that book, Perl can just be extremely weird, after reading the book it at least makes sense in its own world, no matter how unconnected that world seems to be to the rest of the universe :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
"sugguests that the order of the items being operated on has no effect on the answer..."
And a dot suggests a decimal point. Plus or double bar are used as concat
almost everywhere else. Using a dot was not very logical. But I guess that
follows the general philosphy of perl syntax anyway.
Whenever I hear people saying things like this I think that they really lack visibility or understanding into the language's design process. Granted, the coming-to-life of Perl 6 hasn't been the quickest miracle we've seen, but I'm a hundred thousand percent positive that its being done in the best possible manner.
Think about it. Larry Wall accepted numerous RFCs from programmers of all walks, discussing Perl's problems / desires for new features / suggestions for new implementations / ideas how to change the syntax. He commented on each one, indicating whether (1) he agreed with the problem, (2) whether he agreed with the solution, (3) what, if anything, he thought should be done about it.
In the mean time, a radically new language glue system is introduced - Parrot. Perl had such wild success with XS - granted, Parrot isn't just about making language A talk to language B, but it's certainly an example of natural evolution.
As for Pugs, it's been fantastic. It's allowed lots of people to write real and working Perl 6 code (including lots of tests) to evaluate all aspects of the Perl 6 design before it goes into production.
Now, I'm not addressing you directly with this last part; rather, a greater community of Slashdot trolls. If you don't feel like Perl is for you, or if you feel like Perl is no longer for you, fine. Find your way to Ruby, Python, Java or whatever floats your boat.
But please, it's getting really goddamned irritating to have to sift through the comments of a handful of armchair morons that sit at home, interfacing with something called "comments.pl", eating doritos and talking about how the greater Perl community should just drop everything and go to language X, or repeating a tired meme about how the language is making no progress at all (when all they need to do to see the massive progress is read Audrey Tang's blog or visit pugscode.org). And then, there are some mods that feel it appropriate to mark clueless jabs as "insightful".
I am thankful of one thing - Perl's momentum. While everyone else is barking about how (name my scripting language) is great this week for doing web pages or some nonsense, there is still a huge community of devoted, bleeding edge language researchers and smart people, chisel in hand, forming Perl 6 from the rocks.
And while the naysayers are switching languages once a week as they make incremental advantages over eachother -- while they're totally clueless that so many of the 'advancements' in their own languages over the years have been 'borrowed' from or 'inspired' by perl, the aforementioned language scientists are preparing to do once again what Larry Wall did, intentionally or not, when he released Perl on the world - bring about a revolution.