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Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community
LostDiver writes "Computerworld Australia caught up recently with Larry Wall of Patch and Perl fame. He talks about the development of Perl as 'scratching an itch,' a release date for Perl 6 (Christmas day, year unknown) and beauty versus practicality. Computerworld also has some more information on the upcoming Perl 6. A while back they interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame as well."
jamie pointed out a interesting, related video of a presentation by Clay Shirky from last year's Supernova conference in which he discusses why the Perl community (or any web community) drives progress and innovation.
Perl 6 promises to put the "regular" back into regular expression. "We have more powerful primitives in Perl 6," Wall said. "There's no more /x switch to enable extended syntax. No more mode switches like /s and "dot" (.) now means match any character. There's no /m modifier and we've regularised the brackets so {} always mean embedded code."
They didn't drop regexes at all. They've actually generalized them into context-free grammars, and these CFGs are a core part of the language.
If anything, the problem with perl6 is they added way too much.
Take a look at the November 2008 TIOBE index top ten:
Position Position Programming Ratings Delta Nov
Nov 2008 Nov 2007 Language Nov 2008 2007
1 1 Java 20.299% -0.24%
2 2 C 15.276% +1.31%
3 4 C++ 10.357% +1.61%
4 3 (Visual) Basic 9.270% -0.96%
5 5 PHP 8.940% +0.25%
6 7 Python 5.140% +0.91%
7 8 C# 4.026% +0.11%
8 11 Delphi 4.006% +1.55%
9 6 Perl 3.876% -0.86%
10 10 JavaScript 2.925% 0.00%
You can read the rest of the article here...
The version that brought LINQ was .NET 3.5, with C# 3.0. .NET 3.0 was just the Vista technologies ("WinFX": WF, CardSpace, WCF, WPF and arguably also WTF) and didn't affect any of the languages in any way - just a bunch of new namespaces. .NET 4.0 will deemphasize LINQ to SQL in favor of LINQ to Entities, which hooks LINQ up to Entity Framework, a more solid (but as of yet woefully "1.0") mapping framework on its own. As with everything Microsoft, it'll probably live on for ages.
LINQ to SQL is more of a joy to use, but it's a joy to use because it has less syntax, and it has less syntax because it tries to abstract less. Entity Framework tries to abstract more (like abstract away most many-to-many junction tables where the connection itself doesn't have properties) to the point where it is intelligent enough to handle joins for you, and it demands you to be far more explicit about lazy-loading data across relationships (which is a good thing). But it's not entirely there yet unless every query *always* produces an instance of a known type from the database.
It's also two keystrokes shorter. What's wrong about borrowing good ideas from other languages? (I'd tell you what's wrong about borrowing bad ideas from other languages, but you didn't ask.)
You're also years out of date on the string concatenation operator. I leave it as an exercise for readers to form their own conclusions about the accuracy of the rest of your post.
how to invest, a novice's guide
You are hugely mistaken. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html
That would be because you're a fucking idiot and they answered that question so fucking long ago that no one with half a brain doesn't know the answer already.
Perl 6 Myths
From that page in HUGE LETTERS:
Perl 6 can use CPAN modules.
There you go. Question answered. TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO.
Why your post got modded up I'll never know.
All of it.
If you use a Perl 6 implementation which supports Perl 5, yes.
Yes, if they're pure-Perl.
No.
That depends on the Perl 6 implementation. The answer is probably no, but there's no reason someone couldn't write a converter for the basic XS uses.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) can do this now.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Interesting omission:
$ grep "/python" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
168
$ grep "/ruby" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
23
$ grep "/perl" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
570
God Fucking Damnit
The next stable release of Rakudo (Perl 6 in Parrot) comes out next Tuesday. This will be the 24th stable monthly release of Perl 6 on Parrot in a row. You can also see daily Rakudo spectest progress, if you like.
how to invest, a novice's guide
In addition to what the other /.ers have said, bear in mind that one of the main targets for Perl 6 to run on is Parrot a "one-VM to rule them all" multi language VM.
Thus, not only will the binding be accessible to Perl, they would be accessible to any other language targeting Parrot VM.
(Think of something remotely like JVM or Mono/.NET's CLR except that, unlike microsoft's CLR, Parrot is designed from the ground up with all the complexities of modern latest-gen dynamic languages in mind)
Where the things get even more interesting is that the Ruby community is interested in using Parrot as their main VM.
So Parrot would also cure Ruby's problem at the same time.
Also, some of the python users are interested in creating yet another python implementation targeting parrot. And some fans are trying to create a PHP compiler for Parrot. Haskell coders are also involved a lot in the development of both Perl6 and Parrot. Thus Parrot has indeed serious chances of becoming the central interconnection point for lots of modern dynamic languages.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Look at actual available jobs. Not silly popularity contests. Do you honestly believe Delphi is more common than Javascript??
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson