At 1:31 PM -0500 11/27/02, Dan Sugalski wrote:
At 12:59 PM -0500 11/27/02, Chris Devers wrote:
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Nathan Torkington wrote:
\> I've been working with other editors at O'Reilly to free up my time so
  that I can work on the second edition.  Tom's been doing a lot of the

Cool. It may be silly to ask, but has there been any thought as to how the
release of a Perl Cookbook second edition will coincide with Perl6?
I don't think you want to wait that long. The cookbook for perl 6 would likely lag behind perl 6's first major release by at least 18 months--it's tough to document useful best practices for a language that's not out yet!

new version of the book would be nice -- if by the time Cookbook2 is ready
it looks like Perl6 will be right behind it, I'm not sure that I
personally would get a copy because I'd be worried about its shelf life.
I think we're safe there. Could be wrong, but I think we're safe.
At 12:41 PM -0700 11/27/02, Nathan Torkington wrote:
Yes.  We're not holding up any of the revisions to our Perl books for
Perl 6.  As we've all learned over the past years, it's impossible to
predict the pace...
I'd go further than that: it's not even about Larry's pace or the eventual release date.

<predictions assertion_factor="strong" certainty_factor=".001">
Anyone reading this thread might want to keep in mind that Perl 5.x will be out there for *years* after Perl 6 is released. Language upgrades just aren't like getting the latest upgrade of BBEdit or your fave OS software.

There are Perl 4 programs still doing heavy lifting today all over the world, both on and off the Internet. Many installations of v. 5.x are still below 5.6.1, much less 5.8.

Yes, the proportions are shifting, especially with ActiveState's excellent packaging of Perl for Win32, and Apple's mass distribution of Perl in Mac OS X. And this is a good argument, Nat & Tom, for including sections specific to Mac and Windows: much of the growth in usage of Perl will be in those worlds. (My own request would be the converse: ample treatment of cross-platform issues. I avoid platform-unique stuff because I prefer my code to work wherever it lands.)

Despite what I expect will be a brilliant set of transition utilities for converting code to Perl 6 :-), very few sys admins will agree to switch; instead, at best, they'll install Perl 6 *and* maintain 5.x. So very few networked machines will be exclusively Perl 6. Mac OS X uses Perl for some of its internal ops, so that distribution won't change precipitously. This leaves local installations on developers' machines.

In my work today, even Perl 5.8 is irrelevant, because most of my software is deployed on other companies' machines, so I haven't bothered with installing it in my own (OS X) system.
</predictions>

Anyway, I heartily agree that the Cookbook is very valuable. Go Nat and Tom!! Ask us for help as you proceed!

1;
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- Bruce

__bruce_van_allen__santa_cruz_ca__


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