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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.
Growing up in the early 80s on an apple II, one of the things that helped me learn to code was that I could edit and modify existing code like Oregon Trail to cheat. It also helped that there was a limited amount of other things. We didn't have 24 hour kid cable channels so once I got bored then I needed something else to do. I see the same things in my kids. They love kodable on the ipad because it gives them a new character every time they completed a level. A similiar game cargobot they aren't interested in at all because it doesn't have any rewards. I also notice that when they are grounded from their playstation is when they immediately start reading more books, playing the piano more, exploring new apps on my ipad, going outside more, etc... Just like adults, kids are going to gravitate towards what is most enjoyable at the moment and unlike adults they have very little concept of delayed gratification so doing something for their future self is not on their radar. The best way to get kids to want to code is give them something they can do with it whether it is control a robot, create a webpage to show off to their friends, etc... When I was in school alot of kids knew basic javascript and html because that was the only way to have a geocity webpage. Facebook and the likes have allowed kids to have a presence on the web without any need to code. It's still possible to get kids interested in coding if you can show them "cool to them" stuff they can do with it.
“People who made early implementations of Perl 6 came back to me, cap in hand, and said “We really need a language designer.””
“I was almost explicitly told: “Stay out of the implementation! We saw what you did made out of Perl 5”
“With Perl 6, we found some ways to make the computer more sure about what the user is talking about.” ...
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.
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.