hi, At FOSDEM I met Arne Wichmann who is a long time sysadmin, Debian developer and Perl user. We had a short chat in which he expressed his concerns about the complexity, the size (memory footprint) and speed of Perl 6,
Without even taking in account the current memory requirements and speed of Rakudo, I guess, even after lots of improvements we can expect Rakudo to be significantly slower than Perl 5.10 - at least for start-up time - and significantly more memory hungry. I know it will do a lot more so the comparison is not fair but that's not the point. ( For a better comparison that takes in account the features as well see http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/07/an-accurate-comparison-of-perl-5-and-rakudo-star.html ) He, as a sysadmin would like to do the small tasks in a relatively small language. He would like to make sure the modules/applications he will download and will have to support are in such a relatively small language. I wrote him my opinion but I think it would be important to address these issues. (Of course if there already is a page somewhere answer these concerns I'd be happy to just get a link) Here is his e-mail. (forwarded with permission). regards Gabor ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arne Wichmann <a...@anhrefn.saar.de> Date: Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 4:00 PM Subject: FOSDEM - perl 6 critic To: ga...@perl-ecosystem.org Hi... You gave me your card when we were leaving FOSDEM, it took me some time to write a mail... The topic was: why I am very sceptic about perl6... First, my background: I am a perl hacker since '91 (or so), but mainly I am a sysadmin. That means, I do not write a lot of code, but I do a lot of debugging of other peoples code. >From that background, what I have seen in perl6 does not look like a good idea to me: it is too complex. When I read other peoples code I have to be able to understand whatever subset of the perl language they choose to use - which means I have to be able to grasp any concept used in the language. And given the number and complexity of operators in perl 6 I do not feel that this is really doable. My other gripe is that perl5 nowadays already is too big - it takes too much memory and time for small tasks. But that is only secondary. cu AW -- [...] If you don't want to be restricted, don't agree to it. If you are coerced, comply as much as you must to protect yourself, just don't support it. Noone can free you but yourself. (crag, on Debian Planet) Arne Wichmann (a...@linux.de)
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