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Perl 6 was not written with Perl hackers in mind. It was written with programmers from other languages in mind in hopes to draw them into the Perl ecosystem and

by debacle 12y ago

Perl 6 was not written with Perl hackers in mind. It was written with programmers from other languages in mind in hopes to draw them into the Perl ecosystem and I think that was a bad idea. It basically made Perl 6 DOA. What we really needed was a Perl 5.5. A cleaner syntax and OO that isn't shoehorned onto the language. Many of the "features" of Perl 6 aren't really features at all, and in many ways Perl 6 doesn't stand up to other languages that it might compete with (JavaScript, for example).

goodcanadian 12y ago
Indeed, when I first heard about Perl 6 so long ago, it seemed to be trying to remove some of the most quirky, but also most useful features of Perl 5. I more or less immediately decided to ignore it, so I haven't followed what's been going on since apart from being secretly pleased that it has never really shown up.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I think this is an excellent point. Perl excels at facilitating a wide variety of users, and as a language it really does feel like everything and several variations of a kitchen sink included. That openness to any idea is seen as inelegant by some, and accommodating by others. Early on Perl 6 felt like a different language, and while that has moderated somewhat, it still doesn't feel very 'perlish'. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
evincarofautumn 12y ago
Yeah, Perl 6 just doesn’t appeal to me as someone who uses Perl 5 on the regular. Now, a cleaner syntax? Maybe it would be better to avoid the magic variables, but one thing Perl 6 did away with which I really like about Perl 5 is that the dereferencing operators ($scalar, @array, %hash, &sub, *glob) have distinct types, and “use warnings/strict” can catch their misuse. Dynamic typing is a lot more tractable for large software when you have succinct explicit typing. As for non-shoehorned OO, maybe it would be easier for classes-and-inheritance people to learn Perl if it had a more conventional object system, but the fact that you can bless any reference with a package name and use it as an object is really simple and really powerful, and I like it a lot.

by debacle 12y ago

goodcanadian 12y ago

Indeed, when I first heard about Perl 6 so long ago, it seemed to be trying to remove some of the most quirky, but also most useful features of Perl 5. I more or less immediately decided to ignore it, so I haven't followed what's been going on since apart from being secretly pleased that it has never really shown up.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I think this is an excellent point. Perl excels at facilitating a wide variety of users, and as a language it really does feel like everything and several variations of a kitchen sink included. That openness to any idea is seen as inelegant by some, and accommodating by others. Early on Perl 6 felt like a different language, and while that has moderated somewhat, it still doesn't feel very 'perlish'. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

evincarofautumn 12y ago

Yeah, Perl 6 just doesn’t appeal to me as someone who uses Perl 5 on the regular. Now, a cleaner syntax? Maybe it would be better to avoid the magic variables, but one thing Perl 6 did away with which I really like about Perl 5 is that the dereferencing operators ($scalar, @array, %hash, &sub, *glob) have distinct types, and “use warnings/strict” can catch their misuse. Dynamic typing is a lot more tractable for large software when you have succinct explicit typing. As for non-shoehorned OO, maybe it would be easier for classes-and-inheritance people to learn Perl if it had a more conventional object system, but the fact that you can bless any reference with a package name and use it as an object is really simple and really powerful, and I like it a lot.