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Larry Wall On Perl 6, Language Design, and Getting Kids To Code

Posted by timothy on from the putting-a-perl-in-their-heads dept.

M-Saunders writes: Perl 6 has been a long time in the making, but Larry Wall, the language's chief developer, now says it should arrive in time for Christmas. In this interview with Linux Voice, Wall explains why Perl 6 took so long, and describes how his background in linguistics influenced the design of the language. He also discusses ways to get kids interested in coding, and notes that Python has done a better job so far in this respect.

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'd be a Walmart greeter by Jawnn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Before I'd ever code in Perl.

    One of the defining traits of a skilled craftsman is her ability to choose the right tool for the job. In other words, not everything is a nail, rookie.

  2. Perl is better than you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You have obviously never coded in any language, let alone Perl. Comments like these are usually from people with zero real life experience.

    I've been in IT far longer than you have, I guarantee you that. Perl has fallen out of favour, but it is not a bad language. There are things you can do in Perl better than any other language. Full stop. The Internet of the 90s and early 00s was largely built on Apache, Perl, and Linux.

    Perl is masterful at text manipulation. There is nothing extant better than Perl for regex. Nothing. Detractors poo-poo Perl because there "is more than one way to do it". Perl code can be treacherously obfuscated, but that's part of the fun. As long as good code is well documented, there is no harm.

    Perl is far better than awk, sed, and other, older tools. Better even than Python for text work and regex. Python is the darling of the coder world, but has its own share of warts that even the Python camp gets their knickers in a twist over. Perl 1 still runs. Try running Python 3 in a Python 2 environment. You cannot. Perl is backwards compatible with itself, Python is not. The libraries in Python are wholly incompatible most times. Perl has CPAN, the likes of which don't exist in Python.

    It's my opinion that for what Perl excels at, one can get off the ground quicker and easier in Perl than in Python. CPAN helps enormously with this. In closing, Perl is no longer the beauty queen, but she is the girl next door who is a reliable friend, who is acknowledging of her weaknesses and uses, but who does what she does better than anyone else. Perl runs in surprising places. Perl is arguably also faster than Python compiled or interpreted. Just my .02.

    1. Re:Perl is better than you think by qwijibo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Totally agree.

      As much as Python is touted as the replacement for Perl, compatibility between Python versions is painful. While it's possible to write code that works in 2.4, 2.7 and 3.0, it's much harder and more limiting. I'm sure Python is great for environments where there's only one OS image and version of Python to support, which covers small to mid sized companies pretty well.

      However, large enterprises tend to have legacy systems (RHEL 3/4 still run fine in VMs if you don't have to keep up on security patches) and non-Linux based systems. Solaris is pretty painless, but AIX can be painful.

      Perl 5.8 has most of the functionality needed to be productive and covers systems with bundled versions of Perl 10+ years old. If you really want to reach, being compatible with 5.4 gets you to almost 20 years ago.

      It's not that hard to write Perl so it's readable and maintainable by groups of people, as long as they agree to pretty basic standards. Functionally, it's no different than any other collaborative development.

      Perl's biggest strength is how easily it can act as the glue between many different utilities, data sources, etc. There's so many CPAN modules available that it's not hard to find most of the big pieces of code and write what's left.

    2. Re:Perl is better than you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Maybe in your world, but I worked for one of the largest Web hosting companies in the world in the late 90s and we had almost no one using PHP. It was, as I said, largely Linux, Apache, and Perl. LAMP began in earnest around '98, but for server programming, over 90% of our users, and we had tens of thousands, were using Perl. So much so, in fact, we had more Perl guys than any other language. There were almost as many of them as there were sysadmins. The good old days.

    3. Re:Perl is better than you think by digsbo · · Score: 5, Informative

      The best comments explain the "why", such as "this is an arbitrary business rule Joe asked for so a salesman could close a contract and get a BMW. Yes, it breaks the flexibility of the architecture and will never be fixed."