in reply to Perl6 syntax being too much complex? How we will teach and read that?!

I got the same impression (perl6 is getting too complex) already 2 years ago from various (well done) talks from Damian Conway about the topic.

I think that if Perl6 will make it and some 100 programmers will start using it for real projects, it will have the potential to become a language of the elitarian programmer.

However, Perl6 reminds me of PL1 (never programmed it). In a CS lesson, our prof gave two examples.

The biggest problem of PL/I was not the insane complex compiler, but the extensive TMTOWTDI!!! Various Programmers stuck with their preferenced programming paradigms, basically one programming in the "LISP-subset" of PL/I, the next in "ALGOL-PL/I", the next in "ADA-PL/I",...

I can remember of some article I read about comparing PL/I to languages and found, that it already does compare very well to Perl.

My best wishes for Perl6, but before our company starts to use it or migrate from Perl5 - many things have to happen first after the availability of P6...

Bye
 PetaMem     All Perl:   MT, NLP, NLU

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: My Strategy for Perl6
by kappa (Chaplain) on Mar 22, 2004 at 14:48 UTC
    Your reply somehow seemed to me the most insightful of all in this thread.

    It got me wondering if we're gonna end up divided into those who have understood & embraced currying, rules, junctions and the like and those who continue using good ol' Perl.

    "Perl6 - your way to ensure job security". Haha, only serious.

[reply]
      We already have those two different sets of people happily using Perl 5. I don't see how Perl 6 is going to be much different on that subject.

      As for PL/I, it might actually have succeeded had it been an open source language. But PL/I was too complicated to reimplement in an age where reimplemention was the only way to port it.

      Not that I like PL/I all that much. As far as I know, Perl only borrowed one feature consciously from PL/I, which is the ability to iterate over a list of values. In many respects PL/I was not a well-integrated language, and it also didn't have the benefit of several decades of language research to draw on. PL/I did most things in an almost right way, from a modern perspective.

[reply]

In Section Meditations