On Oct 25, 2005, at 6:31 AM, Michele Dondi wrote:
On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Stevan Little wrote:
I think Perl 6's OO system has the potential to be to OO
programming what Perl 5, etc was to text processing. This, I
believe, is in large part due to
Sorry for replying so late. Thought it seems appropriate to post
this in this time of "Perl 6 fears" and rants threads...
Well, the point is that it is interesting to note that "text
processing" is an _application area_, whereas "OO programming" is a
programming language paradigm.
Allow me to clarify.
Perl 5 (and below) are known by outsiders (non-perl users) as being a
really good language for processing text. Ask any friend you know who
has had little or no exposure to Perl and they will probably tell you
this. Of course they will also tell you that it is all line noise,
etc, etc etc. This is the most common perception of Perl by those
people who have (for the most part) never encountered it.
I think that Perl 6 may become like that for OO. When people who have
never used or encountered Perl 6 talk about it, they will say, "I've
never used it, but I hear it has lots of really cool OO features".
Just as now they the same thing re: text-processing.
Sure, this means nothing to people who are actually using it, but
this is mostly about outside perception. These kinds of things are
sometimes what will bring people to the language initially, so they
are not to be taken lightly.
Despite the intro above, this is not meant to be a rant or to
express a fear. But it is intended to raise a meditation.
After all, being known for text processing capabilities may be
somewhat restictive and not faithful of Perl's (including Perl 5)
full potentiality,
Of course not, Perl is also used for CGI, but you can do that better
with Java now (which is a real language cause it's compiled)
;)
People who are not familiar with a language tend to rely heavily on
the common "knowledge" about that language. And also tend to hold
tightly to the myths and pseudo-facts surrounding their own
languages. The combination of these two things tends to lead to silly
statements like the one above.
but "OO programming" is somewhat immaterial either, the "only"
relevance being the suitability for big projects management.
The idea that OO is only relevant for big projects is just as silly
as saying that Perl is only good for text processing.
Sure I would not use OO to write a small utility script, but the
modules I access in the script would probably be written using OO.
And those may be very small modules too, but their re-usability is
greatly enhanced by various OO features (encapsulation, ability to
compose-into or use within another class, etc etc etc). This kind of
thing (IMHO) is why so many people are being drawn to Python and
Ruby. Hopefully Perl 6 can draw them back.
Stevan
