> "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..." ... > How would you respond?
I would expose and challenge the presumptions in the statement. "My bigger concern..." Do you have others? If so, what are they? If not, then what you really mean is "My only concern is ..." More significantly, "...they expect humans to write it." This implies that perl not only takes a little effort to learn (as does any language, or indeed, anything worth doing) but that its *extremely* difficult - well beyond the reach of most mere mortals. This is demonstrably false as perl has a very large following and most of us are common folk (Damian - you go stand over there for a minute :-) - indeed many of us are not even programmers by trade. As an aside, I believe it's an insult to those who have worked so hard on the language design, specifically $Larry - not because he did most of it but because he tries to make the language more intuitive and "incrementally learnable" - more or less the opposite of the accusation. Ask her to take a look at http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html. "You don't learn a natural language even once, in the sense that you never stop learning it. Nobody has ever learned any natural language completely" Others have already made the point - perl is not like most languages in that it offers many ways to do things and it's not expected that you necessarily know them all. The idea is you use the one that matches your brain or the particular problem at hand or that reflects the point you're at in learning perl. Other languages strive for "one obvious way" which offers the comfort of knowing your doing it the "right" way at the expense of being able to choose a more specific way that better matches you, the problem, the time frame you've got to solve it, whatever. I believe this is at the heart of you protagonists' statement. I'd suggest that statements like this reflect an anxiousness of not being capable of getting across the whole of the new language. The sad fact is that it doesn't matter. If you know "a way" that solves the problem in the time frame, then do that. You can learn a "better" way - whatever that means - next time the problem arises and you have the time to do so. "This is a similar problem that Forth and Lisp had." How so? Are they multi-paradigmatic leading to a large and rich selection of syntax and approaches to choose from? Or do they try to shoe-horn you into a specific approach that suited some users/problems but is unsuitable to many? "You see how widely used those are now..." In certain problem domains each remains the language of choice. They weren't aiming to solve as broad a range of problems as perl does so one shouldn't expect them to have as high a profile. In fact, it's harder to think of better examples of languages that cannot be compared with perl. So, whatever problems they arguably have, I wouldn't expect to see those problems in perl - or at least, not necessarily. The other more simple point to make is to ask her - "How much programming/experimenting with perl6 have you done? Can I have look at the results?" If the answer is "not much" then the obvious question arises - "then how do you know its going to be so hard to write?" Perhaps the above is a little harsh (and unnecessarily long) but its how I'd tackle it. Martin
