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

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.

Comments

Awesome!

[MagickalMyst]

It will be nice to see what "bells and whistles" Perl 6 has added.

I can code in several different languages and, while Perl is by far my favorite, I have to say that it was by far the most difficult language to learn on my own. The reason was because the syntax just seemed too cryptic. By contrast, I learned to code in Assembly when I was 14 by reading a book on the subject and trial and error.

In order to get my head around Perl I took a 1 week crash course which really demystified the language. I have now found Perl to be the most useful and versatile language that I have ever used - especially for system administration tasks. It is also great for writing spiders, parsing text, communicating with system resources and interacting with databases. Of course, each programming language is a different tool for getting certain jobs done. Perl is akin to a swiss army knife.

What's also wonderful about Perl is that it is native to Linux and also available on Windows (I use Strawberry Perl at work to monitor hardware as i'm forced to use a Windows Desktop).

I know that a lot of younger coders will scoff at Perl (usually out of ignorance) whilst touting the superiority of VB or Java (which is laughable). To each their own.

It's really nice to see that Perl is still being actively maintained and has a new release coming out. I don't know about the rest of you, but i'm salivating over this one :)