On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Scottow Adrian - adscot wrote: > What is rather more likely to happen is people start to use Perl 6 and find > out how cool it is and use this for new development instead of Perl 5. > Leading to a two perl platform situation. Hmmm I wonder how many people out > there still have to write and support Perl 4 stuff.
I'd tend to agree with that side of things, and a lot of the perl in use doesn't do anythinng complicated that will get really messed up by perl 6. The way I see it is that 6 will start shipping with redhat, and the simple stuff will need minimal effort to convert, and soon enough /usr/bin/perl will point to perl6, and perl5 will have to be called as perl5. And I pick redhat merely because it's a hugely popular distrib, and they do tend to want to get the new/cool/geeky options in there quickly, so the other distribs will copy, the home users will install and that will also drive the ISP market to support it for their clients (though I do admit virtually zero knowledge of perls use in non-netcentric environments, I have a real difficulty understanding the mindset required for producing huge tracts of code that will run for 40 years, won't get any new hardware, and is designed to be expanded internally, rather than through interfacing to other processes[1]) Of course, any complex code currently in development or enhancement will have an amount of pressure to move it to perl 6 to take advantage of the 'real programming' features that it does better, and to help a little with futureproofing. That said, I was talking to someone the other day who was working on something that only runs on perl4, but I've not had that conversation prior to that for several years. the hatter [1] Actually, this is something I've been wondering a little about london.pm-ers, there have been a fair number of posts from people asking things that I would consider beginner-level internet-related stuff while showing that they understand programming a lot better. Are there many people on here who use perl for systems that don't end up on the far end of an HTTP request, or talking to a system that ends up talking to such an app ? I'd say that the vast majority of sysadmins and internet-related developers I know all use perl, so assumed that the converse was true. Is there a secret world that I haven't seen, obscured by the fact that it doesn't come with the skills to self-promote itself as much on the net by default ?
