Bath.pm March 12 Meeting Report

[Leon Brocard]

Magnus Huckvale sent the following bits through the ether:

>  * Perl 6
>    - No-one sees the point in Perl 6 and we don't think it will take off
>    - Amias 'kind of' sees the point
>    - Richard points out that the vast legacy perl in CPAN could be the
> biggest problem
>    - Perhaps perl 6 will end up being used mostly in universities to
> give the clever people there something to think about
>    - Jez suggests that perl 6 is becoming a different languages and
> should therefore have a different name
>    - Magnus reckons that VB6 was probably more backwards compatible with
> VB5 than Perl 6 and 5 will be

Um, this has come up often on the London.pm list, so I'll try and
comment. Perl6 happened because the Perl community was stagnating and
everyone was getting annoyed at the difficulty of changing the Perl
core. Perl6 isn't as different from Perl5 as you might think: it's
just that the apocalypses only point out the differences, not the
similarities. On the whole, Perl5 code will Just Work under Perl6,
it's just that there are additions to make things like OO easier. This
was not the case with the Perl4->Perl5 transition, of course, which
broke quite a bit of code. Some big companies still have Perl4 code
running, and that's not a problem.

I hope you're not scared by Perl6. A lot of good has come of it (think
of all the cool new Perl5 modules in the last year which have come
about just 'cos we were thinking of cool new things) and hopefully
it'll be a) faster b) easier and c) more popular.

What do you reckon? Leon
-- 
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
Nanoware...............................http://www.nanoware.org/

... I used to have a handle on life, then it broke