in reply to Worth still to learn perl 5?

Also, Perl 6 (or what I've heard of it so far) scares the pants off me. It seems that Larry et al have really taken the whole "Second System Syndrome" idea to heart and have decided that Perl 6 should contain every language and syntax construct that ever existed in any language or can ever be imagined. I mean, come on, they've run out of ASCII characters and had to go to unicode for the operators, for gods' sake! :)

It all sounds very cool, but I am having a hard time envisaging doing actual work in such a beast.

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Re^2: Worth still to learn perl 5?
by duff (Parson) on Dec 23, 2004 at 04:49 UTC

    You don't have to use the unicode ops you know. Mostly you can program in a subset of perl6 (the one that most closely resembles perl5) and add in the new stuff as you learn it or decide you really need it. The only problem will then be reading other people's code, but I think that the collective consciousness of the perl community will absorb enough perl6 to be able to help with that. :-)

    duff

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      Modern text editors already allow you to read unicode, but my keyboard doesn't allow me to write unicode easily. However, the given .. where construct really excites me! Finally a real switch, and it will be much more powerful than any other language's switch.

      Our version of Rational Clearcase still uses Perl4 for scripting and it was only installed 3 years ago, when Perl was reaching version 5.6 (I think). Plus I would like to put 5.8 onto the HP-UX 10.2 boxen I work with, but 5.004 is what the code was originally written with and I don't want to mess with it too much. (Not that I haven't messed it up already :)

      How can you feel when you're made of steel? I am made of steel. I am the Robot Tourist.
      Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

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      Oh, I am not scared of learning it it, I like learning things. It just seems that one of the more common (or at least the more valid) criticisms of Perl is that its encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult; and it seems that the response to that with Perl 6 is: "Oh yeah, you think that was something? Well get a load of this!"

      It's like the TIFF spec, I'm pretty sure that a random string of bytes has about a 50% chance of being a valid TIFF file, which makes writing a parser for the format quite a PITA.

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        (Perl's) encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult

        You know, I've always thought statements like this one rather curious. Just because perl allows the programmer to be expressive doesn't mean that it encourages it. The whole point of the TMTOWTDI motto is to remind programmers that they needn't be constrained by one mode of thought, not that they should strive to do things in as many ways as they can think of.

        In any collaborative coding effort there are guidelines (either implicit or explicit and sometimes even evolved) for contribution. These guidelines are social conventions, not technological. Perl's ability to let the programmer code in a multiparadigmatic manner isn't going to affect collaborative development at all except to make it easier. Where else could a few programmers each with expertise in a different programming language all collaborate in a meaningful/useful way but on a perl project?

        duff

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