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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Conflicted 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I see the point of over-rigid staticness, but I think the too formal for Perl is a strange judgement; formalism is inevitable if we are to manipulate more than nine things at once.

    I wonder if you mean "too formal" as "requiring too much explicit annotation from the user", as in forcing people to think about it too much. If so, maybe it needs yet more ergonomic engineering, also known as sugar... :-)

    • The "too formal" comment came from talking with Stevan about the metamodel and remembering Smalltalk. But "formal" was the wrong word[1]. However, I'm convincing myself that theory.pod is a level above the "bless" semantics that we know and love, and can in fact cooperate nicely with it. theory.pod defines a type system, not an object system.

      See my reply to Ovids comment for a more rambly version of this answer.

      [1] Certainly. The whole reason I study mathematics is because of its incredible ability to squash ambiguous or incomplete thought, and that's all due to its formal treatment. Whenever I describe a problem to my mathematical side, I redefine and redefine my terms until I am in precise, unambiguous mathematical language. And many times, once I state the problem that way, the solution becomes obvious. This is the beauty of formalism.
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