On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 20:39, Larry Wall wrote:
> Aaron Sherman writes:
> : If {} goes away in Perl6, then everything you've heard about Perl6 being
> : "not really all that different from Perl5" is either a lie or a damned
> : lie. People keep saying "it's just Perl5, but instead of syntax X, you
> : now use syntax Y". Well, as both X and Y lists grow longer....
>
> Your turn to panic, eh? :-)
I'm not really panicking so much as fretting. I love where Perl6 is
going. Among my favorite new features are named parameters,
typing/propertizing, streamlined OO. I love these features, and wouldn't
want them to go away.
It's just that the more I look at Perl6, the more I think of my days
running training classes. I think about all of the times (even in 1998!)
when people would be confused by something because it didn't work the
same as it did in Perl4.
Perl's history is one of subtly dragging script-hackers from thinking
about code a line at a time to thinking about programming in the large.
Perl 6 continues that trend, but accelerates it exponentally, and I'm
just not sure how ready the audience is.
By the same token, please remember those of us who write "Perl programs"
like this:
perl -MNet::Ping -nle 'print "Ghost DHCP lease: $1"
if /lease\s+(\d\S+)/ &&
! Net::Ping->new("icmp")->ping($1)' \
/var/state/dhcp/dhcpd.leases
and
nice du -a | sort -n | tail -300 | tac | perl -nle '
die "Require non-zero disk size!\n" unless $ENV{DF};
if ($. == 1) {
$total = $_ + 0;
next;
}
($size,$rest) = split /\s+/, $_, 2;
if ($rest =~ /^\.\/([\w.\-]+)\//) {
next if $count{$1}++ >= 3;
}
printf "%5.1f%% %5.1f%% %11s %s\n", $size/$ENV{DF}*100,
$size/$total*100, $size, $rest;' |\
head -100
This is about 60-80% of what *I* do with Perl on a daily basis. Only
rarely do I get to craft modules and write XS interfaces to internal
libraries.
If the new, spiffy features of Perl6 are out of my reach that 60-80% of
the time, and I have to use "perl5compat -nle ...", then the usefulness
of this new language will be largely lost on me.
Oh god... I didn't just show off some of my worst hacks on a public
list, did I? Yikes! ;-)
