On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 08:57:55AM -0600, Jeff Stampes wrote: > I have one coworker known for her stubbornness. I've been hit with the > following several times, and honestly don't have a good reply: > > "My bigger concern with the Perl6 syntax is that they expect humans to > write it. This is a similar problem that Forth and Lisp had. You see > how widely used those are now..."
Languages like Forth, APL and to some extent Lisp give no syntactic relief against the line-noise. You *must* be cryptic in Forth, because that's all that it allows you to be. Being cryptic is part of the language's culture :-) Lisp gives some syntactic relief but it forces you to express that syntax as some form of list. There's no way around that. It's part of the way the language works. Perl6 on the other hand does *not* force you into one paradigm or another. It's got a clean default syntax that most people will use but it allows you to change the rules when you need to. (Hopefully people will think long and hard about changing the rules, but perl won't enforce it) Okay, I said "perl6 has a clean syntax". I suppose that's something your coworker will disagree with. But I bet she'll disagree only because she's focusing on the parts of the syntax that scare her. Just take some typical perl5 code and re-write it in perl6. Show the correspondence between the two. Point out where perl6 makes things better. Et cetera. Does she also have some problem with perl5? It sounds like she's just trying to apply the "perl is line noise" argument but only for perl6. IMHO, the same counter arguments apply. -Scott -- Jonathan Scott Duff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
