On 10/20/05, Nate Wiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think you missed my point(s), but if you feel compelled to write me
> off as a "complainer" just because I have a counter-opinion that is at
> least somewhat built from a good amount of experience, then I do think
> you're wearing a set of blinders to practical issues.
Okay, I may still be missing your point, so let me try to summarize
just to be sure we're on the same page: You say that the thing that
is going to hinder migration to Perl 6 is the fact that it's different
from Perl 5.
We've known for quite a while that Perl 6 is not merely an "upgrade"
to Perl 5. We're designing a different language, but that language is
still Perl. Perl 5 is like seventeenth century English, Perl 6 is
like twenty-first century English (even though we don't quite know
what that is yet). The language changes with the people and the
times, and this sometimes means that the results will not be mutually
intelligible.
Our target audience is only somewhat from a Perl 5 background. People
from Java, from Python, from C, and even just starting to program will
be learning Perl 6, and they would rather have all the language be
zero-based, rather than most of it being zero-based except for $1, $2,
etc. (you were complaining about special exceptions if I recall).
The reason I'm dismissing you as a "complainer" is because of your
broad field of attack. You say that "the method syntax is starting to
make [your] head spin". Well, what about it is making your head spin?
The fact that we use . instead of -> (like every other language on
the planet)? The fact that there are two ways to call a method in
Perl 6:
$obj.meth($arg)
meth $obj: $arg
Rather than only two ways from Perl 5:
$obj->meth($arg)
meth $obj $arg
? The fact that we're declaring methods with "method" instead of "sub"?
If you want something to change, you should suggest a change. If you
think that Perl 6 is changing too much in general, and that we should
go back and make it more like Perl 5, you probably won't get your
wish. To a lot of us p6lers, we've been around Perl 6 for a long
time, and are starting to speak it natively. It feels right. And we
think that when somebody does invest the time to learn it[1], it will
start to feel right to them, too. And after those people have been
writing in Perl 6 for a year, they will be glad that we optimized for
the the Perl 6 programmer, rather than the learning Perl 5 programmer.
Luke
[1] Which will be, what, eight hours for a Perl 5 programmer? Have
you ever spent a month trying to learn, oh, say, Haskell? Because
people do that, too.
