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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.'"
I really wish the term "scripting language" would die. Can't we just call them "very high level" languages, instead? Isn't that sufficient to distinguish the Perls, Pythons, and Rubys of the world from the "high level" languages like C and C++? It is perfectly possible to compile Python programs, for example, to a pyc binary. They aren't any more "scripts" than a.out. The difference between "very high" and "high," to me, is the fact that dynamic datastructures (lists, hashes) are native, so programmers don't have to worry about mundane memory address and pointer nonsense.
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Every year Larry talks about what interesting things have been going on with Perl 6. These interesting things never include "release."
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.
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