I don’t know how to make an “assessment” here, beyond my original comment, which by the way was not intended to be personal.
I have, in fact, taken several long, hard looks at Perl-6 now,
and my take-away is simply that, once any language comes into a production setting, such that literally millions of lines of mission-critical code are written in it, it never goes away ... and it never successfully transforms itself into something significantly different. It does not matter if the “successor” is claimed to be much better. (It does not even matter if it really is.) What matters is a vast investment in reasonably bug-free source code that must now be protected and maintained.
Perl went quickly through many “nothing much” incarnations until ... Perl-5. Then, it reached critical mass. Having done so, it will now be with us, as it is, for an exceedingly long time.
I once worked at a shop that still licensed IBM’s FORTRAN-G compiler ... because they had a large and important system that was written in that dialect.
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I have, in fact, taken several long, hard looks at Perl-6 now, and my take-away is simply that, once any language comes into a production setting, such that literally millions of lines of mission-critical code are written in it, it never goes away ... and it never successfully transforms itself into something significantly different. It does not matter if the “successor” is claimed to be much better. (It does not even matter if it really is.) What matters is a vast investment in reasonably bug-free source code that must now be protected and maintained.
So what?
Sure, if there are huge perl 5 apps with millions of lines of mission-critical code running just fine, they probably won't want to port to perl 6 immediately for no reason. I agree. Depending on particular circumstances I probably wouldn't recommend they do so.
You could have used that same argument to say that ruby, java, etc. would never amount to anything. You'd have been wrong about them too. They are used successfully in tons of new applications.
Guess what? Next year people will be writing more all new applications, and the next year after that they will be writing more and so on. Perl 6 just adds one more language to the consideration of which language will get used. I happen to think it makes a very strong case that it will be the best language choice for a very wide array of applications.
Perl went quickly through many “nothing much” incarnations until ... Perl-5. Then, it reached critical mass. Having done so, it will now be with us, as it is, for an exceedingly long time.
Again, I agree, Perl 5 will be with us for a long time, and the apps I have in Perl 5 will probably still be using Perl 5 long after I have started writing new production apps in Perl 6. So what? I'm not going to let that stop me from using Perl 6 for new apps, where appropriate, any more than others let the mere existence of legacy COBOL apps stop them from developing new code in Java.
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The assessment is that everything that relates to Perl 6 is half complete. Implementation, books, modules anything you name. What you get to see always are blog posts describing it as some kind of grand unified language which will take over the world and survive for some two or three decades. When that will happen we will happily embrace it. But until then stop killing Perl 5 at Perl 6's imaginary existence in the probably future. | [reply] |
But until then stop killing Perl 5 at Perl 6's imaginary existence in the probably future.
What on earth are you talking about?
When that will happen we....
Do you speak for a lot of people? Perl 6 today is better than it was yesterday because people are actually using it and improving it. The same goes for Perl 5. You're welcome to help. You're welcome not to help. It'll happen with or without you.
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Perl 6 today is better than it was yesterday because people are actually using it and improving it
And will continue to be better tomorrow than its today, and the day after tomorrow than its tomorrow. These minute delta changes added together may take how many years? To come to same analogous qualification to what Perl 5 was when the 5.000 release was made on 17-oct-1994 as per this.
It'll happen with or ...
I wish for the same albeit a little faster..
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I wish to add that I did not write the above response. I am not the “Anonymous Monk” there.
In fact, I have not yet responded at all.
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