I think I am in the same camp as Chris Nandor and John Tobey. They, and I, have just given up on Perl 6.
But there is a problem in staying with Perl 5. Due to Perl 6 the Perl 5 community is deprived of the resources of several key people, e.g. Larry, and also "Good Damian". Also, like John, I am interested in Parrot, but wonder if Parrot will be further delayed due to the need to support Perl 6, when a Perl 5 oriented Parrot might be done much sooner. Ruby holds little appeal for me, and Python even less. I think it is telling that most of the responses to my email are a technical discussion, e.g. how to make Perl more like Scheme. But Scheme, while elegant, is still a "boutique" langue whereas Perl is widely used. As we know, when Larry designed Perl he took the best parts of awk, VC, sh, etc., plus added a few excellent new ideas, and produced a language that was a mixture -- but a mix based on features that had been proven to be good. In contrast Perl 6 is a mixture of a variety of theoretically desireable features, e.g. multimethods, functional programming, logic programming, aspect oriented programming, design by contract, etc. that have not been proven in widely used languages. I agree that these features are theoretically desirable. But that does not mean they should all be put into one language. The thrust of the second system syndrome is the temptation to add all those other truly good features that the first system did not have. The claim that people will still be able to program in Perl 6 using a Perl 5 like subset is disingenuous. Most people read as much code as they write. The new language is much larger, and much harder to understand. It is likely to produce odd error messages, at least odd to people who have not taken courses in formal program language semantics. The original design of perl was simple. I learned Perl 4 from its man page -- yes there was one long man page that completely described the entire language. Apocalyse 6 included almost 30 pages discussing the new ==> and <== operators! This is not a good sign. Hopefully helpfully yours, Steve -- Steven Tolkin [EMAIL PROTECTED] 617-563-0516 Fidelity Investments 82 Devonshire St. V4D Boston MA 02109 There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Comments are by me, not Fidelity Investments, its subsidiaries or affiliates. > -----Original Message----- > From: John Tobey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 4:51 PM > To: Dan Sugalski > Cc: Andrew Pimlott; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Perl 6 has become too complex > > > On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 04:35:07PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > > > > > >YES. That's what we want. That is how Scheme and Common > Lisp work. > > >That would make for cleaner code. > > > > Well, if that's what you want... :) > > > > I'm OK with that. Convince Larry and I'll make it happen. > > Thanks but I'll pass. I've given up on Perl 6 (but not on Parrot). > > -- > John Tobey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > \____^-^ > /\ /\ > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
