5 ms·
Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and
by kev009 11y ago
Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box. Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong. I am thankful for perl's influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing. I'm skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there's been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn't matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.
- iheartmemcache 11y agoPerl 6's semantics are so different from Perl 5 it should effectively be a new language. It has metaprogramming macros like CL, concurrency that's as well thought out as Erlang/OTP, they eliminated all of the syntax warts that Perl 5 had with all the implicit magic, and out-of-the-box is absolutely fantastic with rules/grammars that I'd argue it's about as good as Haskell's Parsec. (Speaking of Haskell, I've seen some code that's written in a purely functional Haskell-ish fashion in idiomatic Perl 6.) Oh and there's finally a good object system instead of stop-gapping with Moose (which actually was kind of fun, meta-object programming was cobbled on, but I digress). The take away - don't conflate it with your 1995 Perl. It's about as similar to Perl 5 as C#1 (pre-generics, pre-LINQ, pre-RX, pre-async, pre-NuGet, pre-basically-everything-good) is to modern C#.
- baudehlo 11y agoThere are syntax warts in there. Just new ones.
- paulddraper 11y agoAny example?