As a developer since a quarter century but only a few months in Perl I'm
closely following the process of creating Perl6. I'm exited and also
disappointed what's going on in this process. This morning I read an
article which is completely unrelated to Perl but might give some
insight why Perl is Perl.
A study in Science (291 P.2165) found out that english speaking children
has twice as much reading problems as italian speaking children of the
same age. And about similar difference towards german and french. This
could come from the fact that english has for 40 phonetics over 1100
kinds of writing while italian has for 25 phonetics only 33 kinds of
writing (sorry I hope I've translated it into correct terms). Also 9
years old english children produce more reading error than 7 years old
austrian children.
This is exactly like I feel when I see a Perl script. Lots and lots of
special symbols, special cases. And several where it's not easy to
understand. This might come from the fact Perl was/is designed by
english speaking people. It seems that the complexity of english writing
is directly integrated into Perl. On the contrast Pascal was designed by
a german speaking person (Wirth). I'm not saying Perl should become
Pascal nor Pascal like, I only want to show the difference. While Pascal
(at least standard Pascal) was so limited, it's still possible to read
20 years old programs. Well Larry once said "... lots of languages that
come out of Europe have this thing of ..."
(http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language%40perl.org/msg05283.html).
This also might be related to the language.
I have come to Perl6 just about a month ago, so I can't give much advice
what should be done. Also I'm not too accustomed to Perl to spot
weaknesses. All I can do is give some general advice.
- Make readability your main objective. Readability is possibly the
weakest part of Perl.
- Keep your eyes on modularity. Modularity is by far the best concept
where complexity could be hidden.
- Don't forget usability. This is after all the point why people use
Perl in the first place.
O. Wyss
PS. Is there anywhere the current status of all the RFC's, (good, badly, ugly)?
PPS: Please Cc, I'm not subscribed to the list.
