* Fagyal Csongor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-09-20 17:00]: > I am afraid that when I will be starting to write Perl6 code, > it will be too much Perl5-ish,
Even with a style guide, your Perl 6 code will still be Perl-5-ish. And even once it’s not anymore, six months later you will discover that it’s not really Perl-6-ish either. Until you become fluent in the language, your code is going to be less elegant than it could be. A style guide can give you a bag of broad hints for the most obvious things, but fluency is something that comes from practice, and that inevitably takes time. > and I will end up rewriting my code in every 3 months because I > hate when my code is not elegant (at least to my own > standards). That’s an urge that bedevils many a programmer (myself included). Learn to curb it. (I am trying to; I have already gotten much better about it.) “Improving” old code that works and isn’t being developed, purely for the sake of aesthetics, is a waste of time. If you ever need to touch old code again for a particular reason, then you have justification for cleaning it up. But code comes and goes; if you focus on writing your new code better, your body of code will automatically improve over time. Also, don’t sweat the small stuff. When you write a grocery list, you don’t expend a lot of thought on making it worthy of Shakespear either. ---- All this is not to say there shouldn’t be a style guide for Perl 6 or that it wouldn’t help you. There absolutely should be and it certainly would. But don’t be fooled about how much so. Entirely aside from all these points, I think it is a bit early to be writing a Perl 6 style guide. There are a number of features in the language that have never been tried in the wild in this combination, and I expect it will take a year or two at least until the first proper best practices start to crystalise in the community. Any guide written now would be obsolete very soon. That said, a cheatsheet with broad tips for arrivals from Perl 5 could already be written and will age well. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
