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TorgoX (1933)

TorgoX
  sburkeNO@SPAMcpan.org
http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
"Il est beau comme la retractilité des serres des oiseaux rapaces [...] et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie !" -- Lautréamont

Journal of TorgoX (1933)

Thursday May 06, 2004
08:48 PM

Ugh

[ #18655 ]
Dear Log,

So, someone tell me something happy about Perl 6 and/or Ponie. Last I heard, it was looking like millions and millions of cubic meters of vaporware.


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  • There'll be plenty of time to learn it...
    --

    ------------------------------
    You are what you think.
  • If you follow its development you would know that it isn't going to be anytime soon. Not this year definately.

  • If one out of every ten people who complained about it actually did something useful, it'd be a lot further along.

    (Yes, I realize that I'm making a huuuuge assumption that chronic complainers are remotely capable of doing something useful, but I'm an optimist that way.)

  • ...it's already having a great effect on Perl 5 development. For example, in the deprecation of pseudohashes, and in the incorporation of the // operator in 5.10.

    And useful (and usable) parts of Perl 6 *are* available already in the form of Perl 5 modules like:

    • Perl6::Parameters
    • Perl6::Interpolators
    • Perl6::Currying
    • Perl6::Gather
    • Perl6::Placeholders
    • Perl6::Form
    • Perl6::Say
    • Perl6::Slurp
    • Perl6::Export

    To say nothing of the way that my own on-going struggle to implement the Perl6::Rules module is u

      • Perl 6 won't take that long, even though it's far more than twice as powerful.

      Could you nail this down for us? Is Perl 6 180% more powerful or 400% more powerful than Perl 5?

      Or are linear relationships of power difficult to quantify at this point? Could it be that the power of Perl 6 is ever increasing, exponentially proportional to the distance of its first release date?

      It must be frustrating indeed to have to meet the goal of producing a language that is "far more than twice as powerful" as Perl 5,

      • It must be frustrating indeed to have to meet the goal of producing a language that is "far more than twice as powerful" as Perl 5

        That was never a "goal"; it's merely an observed outcome.

        And, of course, it *is* nonsensical to try and nail down the exact increase in "power". But given that Perl 6 adds features like:

        • hyperoperators
        • junctions (superpositions)
        • coroutines
        • strong typing
        • subroutine overloading
        • multiple dispatch
        • declarative parameter lists
        • named parameters
        • currying
        • properties and t
          • Nevertheless, thanks for pointing out the absurdity of trying to quantify such improvements.

          You're welcome.

          I am, however, reminded of a quote that might be appropriate:


          A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. - Dennis M Ritchie

          • A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

            Actually, I don't think that's appropriate at all. I doubt that many here would seriously argue that C or sh is actually easier to program in than Perl 5 (for most tasks). And yet Perl 5 has far more features than C or sh.

            How much is "in a language" is very close to irrelevant. What matters is *what* is in it. That's why DMR says "some that do". It's not the magnitude of the feature vector; it's the direction it

            • And, after two decades of getting that direction right, doesn't it seem unlikely that he's now going to turn around and head off in some random counterproductive direction. Hasn't he earned a little more of our trust than that?

              What? You're arguing from actual real-life experience instead of from aphoristic principles? Tut tut.

              (See Voltaire's Bastard's [amazon.com] for a rip-roarin' polemic against purely principlistic argumentation.)

              • Actually, I don't think that's appropriate at all. I doubt that many here would seriously argue that C or sh is actually easier to program in than Perl 5 (for most tasks). And yet Perl 5 has far more features than C or sh.

              Well, I guess it's a good thing that neither I, nor as you point out, Dennis Ritchie, makes the point that a language that has more features is necessarily harder to program in.

              I was reminded of the Ritchie quote, however, because, to me, you seemed to be implying that a language that h

              • Look, I'm not really against Perl 6, but I am skeptical. The whole process seems to be the opposite of what has made Perl 5 so successful, incremental development with rigorous field testing.

                But that's precisely how we *are* developing Perl 6. Almost all of the new features we're folding in are either taken directly from, or refactored from syntheses of, existing modules or programming idioms. Here's a partial list of the rigorously field-tested modules whose useful functionality we are in

    • And, as if all that isn't enough, the Perl 6 development effort has siphoned many of the more...err..."exuberant" folk from the P5P list, and thereby allowed P5P to function much more effectively. ;-)

      I think it was Joseph Hall who said it best..."Perl6 is the best thing that ever happened to Perl5." :)

    • Thanks for all your replies. As I was writing my initial mope, my general crankiness was spilling over onto everything, making everything in the world seem intractable and impossible. Then I remembered that I hadn't eaten in twelve hours, and that my blood sugar was about nil, turning me into a cranky woozy mess.

      Next time I go brain shopping, I'm getting one with a UPS.

    • Not to ne a noodge, but I find it humorous that the first good thing you mention about Perl 6 is that it prompted the removal of a feature -- that no one used or understood -- from Perl 5. :-)

      I am not complaining. Keep up the work. You're right, it's produced some good fruit, and someday may be a nice language to use. I don't think TorgoX was complaining either (as someone else implied), but some of us do get idly curious about it from time to time.
  • The delay is keeping the publishers off my back. Back in (99? 00?) when Perl 6 was proposed, I got deluged with requests to do Perl 6 tutorials. I told them to "wait a couple of years". (Second-Systems do not come fast or cheap.)

    By the time Perl 6 is ready for Prime Time I'll have my landscaping done, my kitchen remodeled, and the house painted; this'll leave plenty of time to write a book or two.
  • As I'm getting tired of all the cranking.

    First target's a perl-5 compatible regex compilation module, followed by a perl 6 compatible one, followed by perl 6 in stages. I expect the non-OO stuff will come first, followed by the object system stuff.

    No, I'm not sure of when exactly. The regex stuff's reasonably simple (modulo fights over string representation) with the rest a bit less simple. Perl 6 being parsed by a perl 6 grammar probably won't happen for quite a while, though.
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