State of the Onion 11

chromatic writes "Larry Wall's State of the Onion 11 address is now online. Every year, he describes the state of Perl and its community through metaphor and analogy. This year, Larry explored the history of scripting languages, from their dimly-lit beginnings to their glorious future. Along the way, he also describes several of the design principles invoked in the design of Perl 6. 'When I was a RSTS programmer on a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as a scripting language, at least in terms of rapid prototyping and process control. I'm sure it warped my brain forever. Perl's statement modifiers are straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had some cute sigils on the ends of its variables to distinguish string and integer from floating point. But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book.'"

Comments

Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it

[krog]

The Perl 6 community is more focused on getting it right than getting it into the marketplace ASAP. While this is frustrating for many -- it seems like every other day, there's a Perl 6 feature I want to use in my Perl 5 program -- it has contributed positively to the development of Perl 5 and Perl 6 alike. Perl 6 is painstakingly designed and planned as truly a next-generation dynamic language, and as features are completed, they often spill down into Perl 5. (See the perldelta for v5.10, out very soon, for some good examples.)

Unless someone is willing to finance full-time development on Perl 6, this is the best we get. I think it's pretty good.

Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever

[timster]

That sounds great, until you're trying to work with someone else's Perl code and it turns out that they have a special fondness for those Perl features which were inspired by awk. A language with a clean design means that you can collaborate with others.