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New Video Peeks 'Inside the Head' of Perl Creator Larry Wall (infoq.com)
"I was trained more as a linguist than a computer scientist," says Perl creator Larry Wall, "and some people would say it shows."
An anonymous reader describes Wall's new video interview up on InfoQ:
"With a natural language, you learn it as you go," Wall says. "You're not expected to know the whole language at once. It's okay to have dialects... Natural languages evolve over time, and they don't have arbitrary limits. They naturally cover multiple paradigms. There are external influences on style... It has fractal dimensionality to it. Easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible. And, you know, if you get really good at it, you can even speak CompSci."
Wall also touched on the long delay for the release of Perl 6. "In the year 2000, we said 'Maybe it's time to break backward compatibility, just once. Maybe we can afford to do that, get off the worse-is-worse cycle, crank the thing once for a worse-is-better cycle." The development team received a whopping 361 suggestions -- and was also influenced by Paul Graham's essay on the 100-year language. "We put a lot of these ideas together and thought really hard, and came up with a whole bunch of principles in the last 15 years." Among the pithy principles: "Give the user enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, but hide the rope in the corner," and "Encapsulate cleverness, then reuse the heck out of it.."
But Wall emphasized the flexibility and multi-paradigm nature that they finally implemented in Perl 6. "The thing we really came up with was... There really is no one true language. Not even Perl 6, because Perl 6 itself is a braid of sublanguages -- slangs for short -- and they interact with each other, and you can modify each part of the braid..."
Wall even demoed a sigil-less style, and argued that Perl 6 was everything from "expressive" and "optimizable" to "gradually-typed" and "concurrency aware," while supporting multiple virtual machines. He also notes that Perl 6 borrows powerful features from other languages, including Haskell (lazy evaluation) Smalltalk (traits), Go (promises and channels), and C# (functional reactive programming).
And towards the end of the interview Wall remembers how the original release of Perl was considered by some as a violation of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. "I was already on my rebellious slide into changing the world at that point."
Wall also touched on the long delay for the release of Perl 6. "In the year 2000, we said 'Maybe it's time to break backward compatibility, just once. Maybe we can afford to do that, get off the worse-is-worse cycle, crank the thing once for a worse-is-better cycle." The development team received a whopping 361 suggestions -- and was also influenced by Paul Graham's essay on the 100-year language. "We put a lot of these ideas together and thought really hard, and came up with a whole bunch of principles in the last 15 years." Among the pithy principles: "Give the user enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, but hide the rope in the corner," and "Encapsulate cleverness, then reuse the heck out of it.."
But Wall emphasized the flexibility and multi-paradigm nature that they finally implemented in Perl 6. "The thing we really came up with was... There really is no one true language. Not even Perl 6, because Perl 6 itself is a braid of sublanguages -- slangs for short -- and they interact with each other, and you can modify each part of the braid..."
Wall even demoed a sigil-less style, and argued that Perl 6 was everything from "expressive" and "optimizable" to "gradually-typed" and "concurrency aware," while supporting multiple virtual machines. He also notes that Perl 6 borrows powerful features from other languages, including Haskell (lazy evaluation) Smalltalk (traits), Go (promises and channels), and C# (functional reactive programming).
And towards the end of the interview Wall remembers how the original release of Perl was considered by some as a violation of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. "I was already on my rebellious slide into changing the world at that point."
The idea that Perl doesn't do one thing well just goes to show people haven't changed; they latch onto a catch phrase then go running around seeing who they can whack with it, apparently proving to themselves how clever they are.
PERL's wheelhouse from back in the day was right there in the name: practical extraction and report language. People who actually did that stuff for a living had no difficulty grasping PERL's significance: it made your job easier.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why would you use anything besides Malbolge?
Seriously, just look how straightforward things are in Malbolge!
(I feel silly having to explain this but) this is obviously a "Hello World!" example.
(=<`#9]~6ZY32Vx/4Rs+0No-&Jk)"Fh}|Bcy?`=*z]Kw%oG4UUS0/@-ejc(:'8dc
This is a mess of a "Hello World!" example in Perl 6.
print "Hello World!"
Talk about a write only language!
Seriously, the future has always been Malbolge. Why are people bothering with any version of Perl?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
a programming language is created to speak to a computer/compiler, not to a human.
Hogwash. The conversation is between the programmer and the programmers who wrote the next layer down, repeated a few times, until those programmers eventually have a conversation with the circuit designer or engineer, who speaks a few different languages used by engineers, eventually speaking to engineers who designed machines that build circuits. And it keeps going down, and it is all humans talking, all the way down, until you get to apes grunting.
I think you ought to test/validate your assumptions and consider evaluating what Perl 6 has to offer. Many of the core Perl 6 developers had little experience or interest in Perl 5. The pace of development and number of committers seems to be accelerating.
Performance has gotten about 4 times faster in the last year.
The developer ecosystem is maturing. CPAN6 is here.
Perl 6 provides Inline::Perl5. Which allows backward compatible access to and mixing of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It also allows you to specify a versioned dialect of Perl 6. So in ~10 years when Perl 6.i is released. Your code targeting Perl 6.d functionality which has been deprecated in 6.e and removed in 6.f will still work.
The design and implementation of Perl 6 is clean and heavily influenced by Paul Graham's essay on The Hundred-Year Language. Most of Perl 6 is written in both Perl 6 and a subset of Perl 6 called Not Quite Perl (NQP). Which means Perl developers don't need to learn another language to become core developers.
Larry said that acceleration beats velocity. Perl 6 certainly seems to be accelerating. If you watch the video... there's a lot of exciting things baked into Perl 6. However the focus is on getting things right, clean, and fast (in that order). If/when performance gets within ~10-20% of Perl 5, Python, etc... I think the expressiveness and strangely consistent and clean language design will prompt many to re-evaluate their concept of Perl.
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari