[oak perl] Perl 6 article

[George Woolley]

This may be more relevant 
to the article Tony cites
than to Adrien's post.
I'm not sure.
Anyway here goes.

Some of what won me over to Perl was
* Text was taken seriously. 
   E.g. Regular expressions were powerful 
   and well integrated into the language
* The language and the culture were permeated
   with the "There's More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy.
* Learning to do basic things in Perl was incredibly easy.

Some of my concerns about Perl are
* Regular expressions are cryptic and confusing. 
   Other languages now have regular expressions
   roughly as powerful as Perl's
   (though not as well integrated into the language as far as I know),
* The internals of Perl are becoming incredibly difficult to modify
   (I gather).
* The OO capability in Perl seems a tad clumsy to me
   and grafted on.

As far as I can tell, Perl 6+Parrot nails all of these concerns
and makes even better the things 
that won me over to Perl in the first place.
Regarding the concerns listed above
* Perl 6 rules are a major advance over regular expressions.
* Parrot is a long needed rewrite of Perl internals
   and much more.
* In Perl 6, OO is well integrated into the language.

In my view, Perl 6 is such a major advance over Perl 5
as to make it worthwhile for me 
to learn a modified syntax.

Many complaints have been made about Perl 6.
I'll address one that I care very little about.
and say why.
If you wish to address one too, kool!   <<<<<<
If you wish to give your $0.02 on this one,
that's kool too.

One of the complaints about Perl 6 is 
that many programmers will not understand it.
Well, it's probably true that few programmers 
will master all of Perl 6.
Hey, as far as I can tell few programmers
mastered all of Perl 5;
I sure didn't.

I really don't need to master something
for it to be an effective tool,
Hey, how many people do you know 
who have mastered all of English.
Personally, I don't know any;
but I know a lot of people who use it effectively.

What would disturb me is
if basic things seemed to be harder in Perl 6.
But it looks like it will be 
even easier to learn or teach basic things in Perl 6
(than it it is to learn or teach them in Perl 5).

The artist responsible for Perl culture
thought Perl 6 was needed for the Perl community
as well as for technical reasons.
As far as I can tell he was right on.
 
George

========================================
On Tuesday 26 October 2004 6:34 pm, Adrien Lamothe wrote:
> The problems he describes in his article are similar
> to what is happening in other areas of software
> engineering.
>
> --- Tony Monroe <tmonroe+pm at nog.net> wrote:
> > Here's an article written by someone who doesn't
> > like the way Perl
> > 6 is headed.
> >
> >     http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1339/
> >
> > It's not a short read (based on the scroll widget on
> > my browser).
> > It might even be on-topic here. :-)
> >
> > -- tony