Nice summary. Thanks for posting.
He also mentioned that he has not come up with a good name for the new
pattern matching syntax that is meant to replace perl5's regex. I
applaud this renaming as "regex" (regular expression) is not very
regular since it varies so much from grep/vim/sed/etc. However,
"perl6's pattern matching" doesn't quite roll off the tongue as you
might expect. Surely the perl community can help him come up with a
good marketing term that puts perl6 on the map.
It's not as easy as it sounds, though. Here are some good and bad ideas
I had:
Perl's Extended Regex Language -- unfortunate acronym collision
Perl's Matching Syntax -- probably not appropriate
Extended Search Pattern -- even the acronym implies power and insight
Ballistic Matching -- acronym implies steady flow of data that doesn't
get backed up.
On 4/2/09 3:32 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
flucifr...@acm.org wrote:
The first part was very fun, the second was computer language porn -
several of the non-compiler crowd ran on that :)
Lots of people, the hall was half full.
I attended the MIT presentation. I didn't notice many Boston.pm-ers
there, aside from Uri, of course, who made a call for MIT faculty and
staff to talk to him about YAPC (I don't think he got any takers,
unfortunately; maybe we should have distributed fliers to the crowd or
something?) I think long time Boston.pm lurker Aaron Sherman
introduced himself to Uri after the talk.
I'd estimate the hall was about 3/4 full, with 120 ~ 150 people. The
talk with QA ran almost 2 hours, with only a few people leaving before
the first hour was up. Quite a few left by 6 PM.
Not surprisingly it sounds like the talk followed the same format as
the Harvard talk, with the first half being some historical background
leading to Perl done with lots of humor, and the second half talking
about Perl 6 specifics.
Some of the things covered in the first part included some
justifications for the syntax of Perl in comparison to other
languages, and how it fits with the model of natural languages and the
way we learn them. (Made me feel better about the "line noise"
criticism often lobed at Perl.) He also explained that the "more than
one way to do things" attribute was beneficial in learning the
language, permitting a novice dialect in addition to an advanced
user's dialect.
The second part of the talk was less unique and covered a bunch of
stuff we've seen at prior Boston.pm talks on Perl 6. A few things were
new (to me), such as the features to facilitate parallel processing.
Perhaps the most significant point made in the latter half was the
degree to which they've designed Perl 6 to be extensible, such that
the extensions are "first class" members of the lexicon and not hacked
on with syntax that is inconsistent with the built-in functions.
Larry made a request for people to download and test the current Perl
6 prototypes. (Someone chime in with a link, if you have it handy.)
-Tom
--
Sincerely *Duane Bronson*
bron...@real-time.com <mailto:bron...@real-time.com>
http://www.nerdlogic.com/
453 Washington St. #4A, Boston, MA 02111
617.515.2909
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