> what reasons are there to use perl 6?
Many possible reasons ...
* Masochistic desire to be an alpha tester.
* Starting a new project that will be maintained well into the Perl 6
era, writing it with "use v6;" style may lower maintenance costs later
after your maintenance programmers are P6 enabled. It may be too early
for most organizations to see this benefit.
* Even before then, small bits of Perl 6 code may coexist in legacy
maintenance with a large PHP code-base better due to uniform sigils.
But remembering how much trouble I had with Perl's unorthodox
punctuation as I was *slowly* transitioning from sh+awk (after 10+
years) -- little mistakes can be hard to see -- I may defer starting
to use Perl 6 until I can do most of my Perl in Perl 6. But mabye the
re-huffmanizing is _so_ different that I can toggle back and forth
easily?
[E.g., Dvorak keyboard is hard to switch back from when presented with
an unmodified QWERTY because it's TOO SIMILAR physically -- a one-hand
chord keyboard is easy to use alternately with QWERTY since it's
DIFFERENT muscle-memory, different skill, no UN-learning required.]
> what can it do that i can't do with with X language?
Anything you can do in Perl 6 you could already do in Lisp, if you dig
hard enough, in a good enough Lisp. Most people don't want to, though.
Most current languages are Turing complete, so "can" and "can't"
aren't the relevant metric.
We need to ask what can it do $better for my $better (qw{
shorter_code run_faster algorithmic_expressivity } ).
> why write something using perl 6?
Junctions may be the big-win new syntax/semantics of Perl 6.
Junctions make new classes of algorithms both linguistically and
computationally efficient, things previously only done in-the-large in
shell with ugly background& and wait, or really gnarly multithreading
frameworks, or Fortran supercomputers. This may make your program
shorter or faster or both. Even if you don't have multiple cpu cores
to execute the junction in parallel (constant time :-), expressing it
such usually simplifies logic, and has the code ready to consume
multiple cores when they become available after your next hardware
upgrade.
Junctions may be the big win that drives me to try Perl 6 sooner
rather than later.
What other P6 features are considered "big win" motivators to start
using P6 by others?
--
Bill
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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