Indeed a particular syntax can have a strong influence on us.

Why, just the other day I almost typed 'sub' into a PHP source. (It's 'function' there.) Two reasons I really wanted to learn C when I was starting out in programming was because '{' and '}' were much quicker to type than 'begin' and 'end' and they also were more visually distinct from functions. I often want to use curly brackets for associative arrays in PHP (square brackets there). I often try to use foreach in JavaScript (It never seems to work). In JavaScript, I sometimes try concatenating strings with '.' and using '+ 0' (as opposed to '- 0' which doesn't have precedence issues from overloading) to coerce numeric context.

Oddly enough, after a couple of minutes with the code at hand I remember what language I'm using. After that point, the right spelling for the language I'm using tends to come back to me pretty easily and I'm on my way.

I have faith my transition to Perl 6 will be no easier but probably not much harder. I'll try Perl 5 in Perl 6. I'll go back to a Perl 5 project and try Perl 6 syntax. Of this I have no doubts. After a few minutes with one or the other, though, I'm sure I'll get in the groove of that particular dialect.


Christopher E. Stith

In reply to Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6? by mr_mischief
in thread What's wrong with Perl 6? by duff

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