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I started off professionally writing Perl 5. A few comments. Perl 5 fails in separate areas. * no standard OO system * no standard exception system * no stan

I started off professionally writing Perl 5. A few comments. Perl 5 fails in separate areas. * no standard OO system * no standard exception system * no standard module system * context-driven polymorphism * the standard library didn't have JSON and a few other key needs built in, so dragging in CPAN all the time was a hassle. The first three issues generate maintenance issues that are not found in other languages that are roughly isomorphic. The fourth generates bugs. The fifth generates deployment problems out of line with its competitors. Perl is also, as alluded to elsewhere, an expert tool. Those have not fared well for the past 25 years, sadly. Hopefully in the next 25 years, as the industry matures and stratifies, experts will have the opportunity to select and use difficult but high quality tools on the regular. The Perl 6 horse got put together for another ritual beating, I see. Have at it. Sigils and the other ideas from linguistics are a notion which I believe will be adopted down the road more and more. I see them as one of the best syntactic ideas of Perl, although the context-shifting use of them (@ vs $) is something I see as bug-prone.

c-cube 6y ago
Is there any sign that other languages are going to adopt sigils? I can't think of any new language that does, and no one ever talks of the idea. If anything, types are getting more popular and will probably totally subsume sigils?
- bmn__ 6y ago
  I like to think that I have a pretty good grasp on the current landscape, and concur that a trend can be observed for new languages specifying their identifiers to be sigil-free. Types are an orthogonal concept, so this direction of thought is fruitless and explains nothing. (An example is Raku, it has both typing and sigils.) People should discuss what sigils or lack of them brings to the table, and language designers must be challenged to defend their decision for or against sigils and explain the resulting trade-off specific to their language. I sincerely hope they are not simply acting out of ignorance, but it's plausible because the language design docs make no mention. Well, Sturgeon's law applies: not everyone's a Larry. Yet, I don't see that kind of rational discourse happening in the vast majority of cases. Instead I see something very superficial, namely end-users complaining that languages are different. Features that cannot be found in the majority of languages are suspect and basically criticised as a foregone conclusion for just being there, i.e. they will not entertain finding out what the advantages of having identifiers with sigils are. This makes me sad because tolerating this discourse makes the world dumber.

c-cube 6y ago

Is there any sign that other languages are going to adopt sigils? I can't think of any new language that does, and no one ever talks of the idea. If anything, types are getting more popular and will probably totally subsume sigils?

bmn__ 6y ago
I like to think that I have a pretty good grasp on the current landscape, and concur that a trend can be observed for new languages specifying their identifiers to be sigil-free. Types are an orthogonal concept, so this direction of thought is fruitless and explains nothing. (An example is Raku, it has both typing and sigils.) People should discuss what sigils or lack of them brings to the table, and language designers must be challenged to defend their decision for or against sigils and explain the resulting trade-off specific to their language. I sincerely hope they are not simply acting out of ignorance, but it's plausible because the language design docs make no mention. Well, Sturgeon's law applies: not everyone's a Larry. Yet, I don't see that kind of rational discourse happening in the vast majority of cases. Instead I see something very superficial, namely end-users complaining that languages are different. Features that cannot be found in the majority of languages are suspect and basically criticised as a foregone conclusion for just being there, i.e. they will not entertain finding out what the advantages of having identifiers with sigils are. This makes me sad because tolerating this discourse makes the world dumber.