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.

Comments

Re:Dropping regex as a core lang feature

[psy0rz]

they wont be dropping regex completely. from tfa:

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."

Re:Dropping regex as a core lang feature

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who needs Perl 6 when we have Perl 5?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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...

Re:perl is irrelevant

[chromatic]

Why?

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You're also years out of date on the string concatenation operator.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.

Re:Christmas?

[BenLeeImp]

You are hugely mistaken. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html

Re:Christmas?

[chromatic]

I'm not sure how much of that applies to modules, though.

All of it.

Can Perl 6 code use a Perl 5 module?

If you use a Perl 6 implementation which supports Perl 5, yes.

Does the Perl 6 converter work on modules?

Yes, if they're pure-Perl.

Given that the object system is getting an overhaul in Perl 6, does that break OO-based modules?

No.

Is Perl 6 source-code compatible with the native code stubs that many modules, for example database drivers and GUI libraries, require?

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.

Re:Christmas?

[chromatic]

If I've understood it correctly, Perl 6 will be able to call library functions directly, without a lot of fuss.

Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) can do this now.

Re:Christmas?

[cxreg]

Interesting omission:

$ grep "/python" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
168

$ grep "/ruby" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
23

$ grep "/perl" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
570