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Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community

Posted by Soulskill on from the wall-to-wall-coverage dept.

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.

4 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dropping regex as a core lang feature by psy0rz · · Score: 5, Informative
    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."

  2. Re:perl is irrelevant by chromatic · · Score: 5, Informative

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    You're also years out of date on the string concatenation operator.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

    --
    how to invest, a novice's guide
  3. Re:Christmas? by BenLeeImp · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  4. Re:Christmas? by chromatic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    how to invest, a novice's guide