On Jan 21, 2008, at 11:24 PM, Peter Keane wrote:
...Like spoken langauges, syntax in a programming language influences what/how things might be expressed, even though you can express the exact same facts in any language. Perl6 will, I think, be one of those ultra-dynamic languages like Ruby that lead folks to write little DSLs (domain-specific languages) to get a complex domain-specific task accomplished.
Ironically, I was thinking about this yesterday. On one hand I thought, "I have a language I can use, feel comfortable with, and does what I need to do." I then thought, "Just like different human languages, computer languages have strengths and weaknesses. You need different tools for the job. Just like different styles of guitar playing (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll, etc.) require different guitars.
The internals of Perl6 are said to be much cleaner that Perl5 and it will run on the Parrot Virtual Machine which will also run many other languages (like the Java Virtual Machine which can now run Ruby (JRuby) and Python (Jython)). So expect to see projects incorporating many langauges in a single code base....
This was a feature I was not aware of. Does this mean I will be able to write Perl programs that use the Java-based Lucene indexer? -- Eric Lease Morgan University Libraries of Notre Dame
