Damian Conway On Perl 6 and the Philosophy of Programming

M-Saunders writes: Perl 6 has been in development since 2000. So why, 14 years later, hasn't it been released yet? Linux Voice caught up with Damian Conway, one of the architects of Perl 6, to find out what's happening. "Perl 6 has all of the same features [as Perl 5] but with the rough edges knocked off of them", he says. Conway also talks about the UK's Year of Code project, and how to get more people interested in programming.

Comments

Re: "The real problem..." he explained

[CRCulver]

Wrong been using python3.x for ~12months. some people don't like change and prefer to whine - meanwhile in the real world people like me get on with it - Quietly.

I'm not a professional developer, but I do meet a lot of Python devs, and I always ask them which version of Python their shop is developing for. The answer so far has always been Python 2, often Python 2.5 or Python 2.6.

Recently I wanted to write up a new application for something since existing ones don't fit my particular needs, and do it in Python 3 since I prefer its Unicode handling, but virtually all the libraries I could think to use were still Python 2 only, and a look at the mailing lists showed that these libraries' developers were positively hostile to Python 3 ("if you want to start a Python 3 fork, fine, but you'll get zero recognition or help from me").

Anecdotal? Sure. But still enough to get one down.