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Perl's State of the Onion 10
chromatic writes "Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion addresses cover subjects such chemistry, science, music, lingustics, and screensavers. They occasionally discuss Perl too. This year's, State of the Onion 10 compares raising children into productive adults to guiding the development and design of a programming language. Perl turns 19 soon; Larry says that she'll truly grow up with Perl 6."
Perl just turned legal? Great. Perl has been fucking me for the last 10 years, and now I hear this. Honestly, Larry told me that she was 35! I didn't know.
What Perl 6 needs, and I haven't seen yet, is a compelling reason to switch. It may be better under the covers, but Perl 5 works great from a user's perspective. In fact, I've been using 4 and 5 over the past decade and a half, since '91, to craft almost everything. It's part of my nervous system. I've internalized it.
So why would I switch to Perl 6? I'm just not hearing compelling reasons other than they've randomly changed a bunch of stuff so what I know doesn't work anymore or isn't optimal. The installed base of Perl 5 users is Perl 6's biggest enemy.
This would be like changing vi keys to make them conform to the CUA standard or Emacs - it might be progress, but people are used to vi qua vi in its historical form and don't want progress because the standard keys are in their nervous systems now.
Hypocricy? I don't think this word means what you think it means. Could you explain what you think is so hypocritical about this design decision?
From what I understand, the Perl6 operators were chosen according to Huffman compression principles. Frequently used operators became shorter, less frequently used operators became longer.
The bare colon operator turned out to be much more useful elsewhere. The dash-arrow operator was initially borrowed from C++, but these days, most dynamic languages all use dot for the same purpose.
This sound more like pragmatism than anything else.