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:Why should I use Perl instead of Python?

[ThePhilips]

Besides CPAN, Perl was one of the first languages to integrate advanced data structures - lists and hashes - directly into language itself. And not some half-assed implementation - e.g. C++'s STL or Lisp' lists - but really really good implementation, supported by many standard functions and (most importantly) internal optimizer.

Last, but not least, Perl is quite well performing. Compromise fitting most tasks: scripts are loaded relatively fast (e.g. compared to Python), yet if you use structures intelligently, it will run very fast.

All that together, with Perl's pragmatical approach, you have a tool which easily scales from irreplaceable "perl -pe" one-liners to relatively huge projects. And in many cases, huge projects start as one liner scripts. That's where I'm addicted to Perl: if you know what you do, you can write short but powerful scripts in few seconds. And if you need, you can easily improve the one liner into some good tool, usable by other too.

As noted by many Perl fans (like I am) you do not write in Perl - you think in Perl. It is language without any artificial barriers between you and resources you need to accomplish your task. That's why it is so hard to get off the Perl.

P.S. Can't compare to Ruby, since I haven't used it. Few examples I have seen before hadn't stroke me as anything radically new or more useful/practical than Perl.

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.