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Re^4: too much free timeby TheDamian (Vicar) |
on Apr 01, 2014 at 21:27 UTC ( [id://1080641]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Yes, I hear this suggestion a great deal. In fact, I've been hearing it
for 20 years now...and mostly against Perl 5 itself:
. .
It's almost as if some people feel that the motto "There's more than one way to do it" applies to everything about Perl...except Perl itself. But, in my opinion, "Perlishness" isn't really about syntax, or semantics, or even features. It's about the belief that programming languages should be designed to be flexible and powerful, and should come with all the useful tools and data structures built in, and should make easy things easy and hard things possible, and should do so without getting in your way. And by every one of those measures, Perl 6 is arguably more Perlish than Perl 5. And as for "no resemblance (nor compatibility) at all to its erstwhile namesake", remember that I deliberately chose a Perl 6 approach that emphasized that language's many new features. The following is also a pure Perl 6 version of "bottles of beer":
I think you'd have to concede that this version bears at least some resemblance to (and compatibility with) Perl 5, given that it differs from being executable Perl 5 by exactly one character. Or I could have written my Perl 6 version "bottles of beer" like this:
...which is executable Perl 6 and also executable Perl 5. So, sure, when I use just the new features of Perl 6, it seems like a language entirely different from Perl 5. But that's just as true when I use the new features of Perl 5.20 and it seems like an entirely different language to Perl 5.8. Or when I use the new features of Perl 5.8 and it seems like an entirely different language to Perl 4. That's just the nature of all programming language development. Damian
In Section
Meditations
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