Since I came to programming after the days of Forth and Lisp being prominent languages, I can't dispute nor concur with her statement. How would you respond?
First, a bit of advice that convinced me to go with Perl 6 not only philosophically, but practically too. Go here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/tools/typograf/webservice/ This page is in Russian, but you just need the links with names of programming languages at the bottom. This is the website of Art. Lebedev studio, famous internationally for the (yet-unreleased) Optimus keyboard and famous in Russia for designing ace websites. On their website they also have a tool called "Typograf" for improving the typesetting of plain text and HTML. And they offer a webservice for it too. The links at the bottom of the page show examples of code for accessing the webservice in different programming languages. I was pleasantly surprised to see both Perl and Perl 6 there. When i compared the two pieces of code, i was just stunned. This code is practical. Hey, it's webservices! For those vanilla webservices the Perl 6 code was perfectly readable and cleaner than its Perl 5 counterpart. And what's most important, *it was still Perl*. Just cleaner and updated for 2006. So there. Show that to your stubborn coworkers. The first sentence in the Camel book can stay the same: Perl 6 is still a language to get your job done and i believe that most of the time their job will be to program webservices and not lazy-evaluated arrays or thread-safe hyper-junctions. And when they will want to do that, they will be able to. Now about some philosophy ... I mostly second Fagyal - and please see below ... On 29/08/06, Fagyal Csongor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Perl5 is hard to read, and so will Perl6 be. That (mostly) comes form the gazillion tons of syntax sugar we have, and from the lots of DWIMmery.
Syntactic sugar and DWIMmery is good, when it's done well. In Perl 5 it is done quite well. In Perl 6 it is potentially even better. No one *has* to use, or for that matter, learn about the hyper-fatarrow (see http://aharoni.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html#post-7389599670533029862 ). It would be clever on behalf of documentation writers (i am gradually trying to become one) to update perlop and perlsyn in such a way that all the new and smart operators won't scare people away. And the Perl 6 edition of the Llama book doesn't even have to mention them until some very late chapter, if at all.
So yes, your coworkers are partially right, at least IMHO: Perl6 syntax is way overloaded, and that can give you some headache. I do not like the unicode operators, either, for example.
Read Larry's talk about Perl 5 and Perl 6 in Israeli OSDC 2006 ( see http://wiki.osdc.org.il/index.php/Talks/Larry/PCFP ). Try to listen to it too. He talks about Unicode in the part about hyper-operators and tries to avoid the inevitable question - "how do you type it". His explanation is simple, but just right. The world moves on, why shouldn't Perl?
However, a par excellence programmer, who actually *writes* code, might never experience issues like this. I mean you do not have to use what you do not need to use.
You have the ability to be expressive. You don't have if you don't want to. There's always C to go back to.
How many here know, for example, the exact syntax in Perl5 regex for, say, "zero-width look behind assertion" do that without looking it up in the man pages? :)
(?<=) I didn't cheat. I actually used it yesterday. And it changes in P6, although i'm not so sure to what exactly. Is it <?after> ?
Perl5 is like three languages combined into one. Perl6 is like 5 languages combined.
Yet again, i'll quote Larry: All your paradigms are belong to us. And i'll add: But you can still write one-liners. And you can still get your job done. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni, http://aharoni.blogspot.com/ "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - Thurston Moore ______________________________________________________ Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
