use Perl

I've actually read all these these references before posting here. I don't usually actively participate in discussions, though.

"Scary" was the least offensive adjective I could think of to express my general disapproval of it. "Batshit fucking insane" sounds more like my thoughts. :)

Anyway, the whole periodic table of operators sounded novel when I first looked at it a few years ago. These days, I just feel like such things could be the last nail in the coffin for Perl in general.

I'm a bit more optimistic lately as the downward trend for Perl 5 seems to be history (or least it's now stable). But I still think Perl 6 has a large potential of doing some serious damage.

Perl 6 is probably a nice and revolutionary language and I remember being excited about its ideas in the past. However, my feeling is that in the middle of turning those ideas into reality, people got lost somehow (or just chose a very awkward and longer path).

I'm guess I'm just too much into "Perl Survival Mode" in the past couple of years. Being a Perl supporter has been largely an "us vs. them" thing everywhere and Perl 6 just seems to get into the way sometimes. It wouldn't be an issue if everyone else was reasonable, but it's common to try to push Perl as a solution only to have some moron reply something along those lines: "Come on, we're not really going to choose a language with a periodic table of operators, are we?"

This isn't an issue in pure-Perl shops, but these are rare in most places in the world and *extremely* rare where I live.

Well, I just looked at the new periodic table and if by "gorgeous" you meant "scary", I agree with you. :)

If you think about it, I guess this discussion wouldn't even exist if Perl 6 wasn't called Perl 6. This implies it's a successor of Perl 5 and thus, eventually, Perl 5 will be obsoleted by Perl 6.

Being completely honest, what goes through my mind when I read about Perl 6 these days is something like: "Oh shit, I will need to go through all this madness sometime in the future when Perl 6 is completed".

I would just ignore Perl 6 if it was called something else and move on happily with my Perl 5 (with added sugar) life.

Since I can't do this, I get a bit worried because I like Perl and think people in the Perl community have the best development philosophy I've seen. But if Perl 5 is ever obsoleted by Perl 6 I just feel that I'll just move on to another more attractive language such as Groovy (and try not to stab people from the Java community in the process).

Maybe I'll try joining #perl6 some time. Currently behind a stupidly restrictive firewall at $work, so no IRC, so this makes life a bit more difficult.

I agree that the "intuitive to the uninitiated" metric shouldn't be considered a major thing (although, I think it is desirable if it doesn't get into the way of other features).

To be honest, I'm just worried that typing all these "shift characters" everywhere will make programming in Perl 6 actually a tiring experience which results in a bad aesthetic result. I mean, pre-"syntax sugar revolution" Perl 5 was already at the limit for me.

I think I understand the motivation behind the twigils. In other programming languages you can't immediately tell if a variable name is a local variable or an object attribute, for instance.

And while I can't think of a better solution, twigils just don't seem to be the best solution to me. Maybe always requiring the object to be explicit is a better solution (e.g. $self.attribute). But then you'll hit me with a TIMTOWTDI hammer since that probably also works. :)

I don't agree that "line-noise appearance" comes from not knowing the semantics. There are some cases in Perl 5 land where I'm perfectly aware of the semantics but the end result still looks like line noise (e.g. manual symbol table manipulations).

But these are very specific situations and you can even argue that it's a feature - these constructs should only be used by those who know what they're doing.

Having all this everywhere is the issue I'm worried about.

I joked about "specialized keyboards" because I was thinking of something like second row of keys above the numbers, as the shift key would be used a lot.

Of course that it's possible to get used to it (specially considering I'm already a Perl 5 programmer). But I can assure that if Perl 5 people thinks the syntax is a little awkward... well, the rest of the world will find it, at least, *very* awkward.

I'm saying all this because I just didn't bother following up on Perl 6 anymore after the Unicode ops and the whole "periodic table of operators" thing.

All new developments in the Perl 5 world seem to try to "clean up" the syntax, i.e., less non-alphanumeric characters whenever possible. These initiative were supposedly influenced by Perl 6 features, so it came as a shock when I read some real Perl 6 code and it looks a lot "dirtier" than current Perl 5 code.

Anyway, I thank you for your very detailed reply to my comment.

I don't mean to be a troll or anything like that and I haven't really looked at the how the Perl 6 syntax has evolved over the years.

So, out of curiosity I decided to take a look at the commit and I was bewildered by code such as:


%*pads{$*current-block} = {};
for $ -> $statement {
    self.find-vars($statement, 'statement');
}


I mean, I can see the point in Perl 5 sigils. They're not pretty, but they're acceptable and they didn't bother me in these almost 10 years I've been programming in Perl.

But (and I'll definitely be tagged as a troll for this) this almost looks like line noise to me.

I mean, assuming we use shorter variable names, the following code would be valid:

%*foo{$*bar} = {};


This means more sigils the alphabetic characters in an assignment.

Granted, I don't know what the "*" stands for, neither the "!" which it replaced (seems to be attribute declaration). But if this is something which would be used regularly throughout the code... Perl 6 programmers will likely require specialized keyboards. Thankfully I don't see any Unicode operator madness as was the case some years ago (are they still around?).

I guess this just reinforces my feeling that Perl6 should be renamed Perl++ or PerlNG.

(sorry if I seem trollish, that really isn't my intention)

Oh well, maybe I should have phrased that as "in the same way C++ has more modern features than C".

But I believe you were still able to understand my point.

To be honest, I really think a part of all this isn't FUD.

Perl 6 is being talked about... inside the Perl community. You don't see articles by random people not involved in its development somehow.

As some of the comments state, I honestly think Perl 6 should really change its name to something like Perl++ or PerlNG (next-generation) and free up the name for regular Perl.

I'd rather see a Perl 6 which is basically Perl 5.12 but with some heavy optimizations done to add support for a built-in Moose-like syntax.

I guess this would be good marketing for both projects. And we would be able to sort of have an analogy between C/C++ and Perl/Perl++ (or NG).

Perl++ would have much cooler stuff than Perl, in the same way C++ has much cooler stuff than C. However, both languages are clearly distinct and both have their own places.

It doesn't matter how much we tell outsiders that Perl 5 is one language and Perl 6 is another: the sequential thought is too strong (specially when you have Java marketing which calls version 1.6 as Java 6, 1.5 as Java 5, and so on).