Re: Perl, the new generation
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Russ Allbery [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispere d: | All Perl programmers, including lone ones, really should be using CPAN as | much as they can, which means that the parts of the language needed to use | CPAN modules are part of the understanding you need. This comment in and of itself sets a very high bar on perl's usability. In essense, you are saying that to use perl you must know (of) the 2500+ modules in CPAN. You are also saying that OOP is now required, because many/most CPAN modules use OOP. -spp
Re: Perl, the new generation
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Trond Michelsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] whis pered: | You don't need to know any of the modules in CPAN to use perl, but once | you learn how to use search.cpan.org, your productivity will most | probably increase dramatically. Just like knowing how to use the | documentation will make you more productive. The problem with this philosophy, is that you are talking about a fullblown software development situation. You are probably correct if I want to write a huge application. If I just want to write a quick script to (for example) do disk usage reporting. This was my first perl script, almost 10 years ago now. I was able to go from 0 (picking up Camel1) to having this script completed and working in 2 days. I just randomly chose 4 modules from the Security category. Two were dead links (User::pwent, User::grent), one (MD5) was a wrapper that sent me elsewhere (Digest::). It has both a functional interface and an OO interface. The last has only an OO interface (Authen::ACE). While I was there I (hypothetically) decided I wanted to write a web page. I searched for Web. 112 packages in 24 distributions. To look through all that is going to take a lot more time than I want to spend on writing a web page. I'll just do it by hand. I was also thinking of doing some CGI. 369 modules in 81 distributions. 75% (approximately) have no synopsis listed, so I have no idea except by name what they do. -spp
Re: Perl, the new generation
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Jarkko Hietaniemi [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispered : | Ummm, I must have missed the have to know Unicode, have to to know OO, | have to know references part in the Apoc2. Could you show it to me? Atoms- Unicode. If everything is Unicode, you're going to have to grok Unicode (at least tangentally) to be able to use perl. RFC 161- Everything becomes an object. Filehandles are more object oriented in Perl6, and the special variables So, *probably* if you are going to use filehandles, you'll have to grok OO. $#foo is gone. If you want the final subscript of an array, and [-1] isn't good enough, use @foo.end instead. There's *lots* of mention of OO in relatively common, normal things. RFC 009- That is, all variables may be thought of as references, not just scalars. The whole concept of $calar, @rray, and %ash are changing to become references. If you don't understand references, you won't be able to use variables. That pretty much seems to say to mee you must know OO and references. Unicode may be something more easily hidden under the rug. -spp
Re: Perl, the new generation
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Nathan Torkington [EMAIL PROTECTED] whi spered: | This is off-topic for perl6. Objection, your honor! This is a logical extention of part of the discussion. If we're discussing what is wrong with perl5 to make perl6 better differentiating between philosophies is quite on target. -spp
Re: Perl, the new generation
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Larry Wall [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispered: | Peter Scott writes: | : So, I wonder aloud, do we want to signify that degree of change with a more | : dramatic change in the name? | | I'm inclined to think that people will be more likely to migrate if | they subconsciously think we're taking continuity into consideration. | Which we are, albeit not at a syntactic compatibility level. It seems to me that recently (the last two years or so) and especially with 6, perl is no longer the SAs friend. It is no longer a fun litle language that can be easily used to hack out solutions to problems. It is now (becoming) a full featured language, quite at the expense of its heritage. When we moved from 4 to 5, so people thought we should continue developing 4 without all the useless new stuff, like OO and threads and etc. I wonder more and more if they weren't right. I wonder if as 6 develops if we shouldn't split off the old 4 syntax and have two languages. -spp
Re: ANNOUNCE: smokers@perl.org Discussion of perl's daily build andsmoke test
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Richard Foley [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispered: | [EMAIL PROTECTED]# | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] # bleeding edge? | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] # not very exciting... | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] # hmmm? People, please trim your CCs. This does not need to be broadcast all over the place. It especially shouldn't be CCed to -announce. -spp
Re: ANNOUNCE: smokers@perl.org Discussion of perl's daily build and smoke test
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Alan Burlison [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispered: | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | PIT - Perl Intergration Testers | | Alan Burlison Not to pick on Alan, God knows he's been doing us all a real favor lately with the leaktest stuff. But can we please stop crossposting this thread to -announce? For that matter, does it really need to go to 7 individuals, and 5 lists? -spp
Re: Critique available
Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] whispere d: | On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 10:14:25PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: | Not in the p5p sense, at least. Regardless of the levels of disapproval, | generally the disapproval was voiced with at least some courtesy. p5p is | rather less polite about things. | | I think that's what they call a "false memory". There's been one acrimonious | thread in the past six months or so. Not to mention "revisionist history". There were any number of uncourteous voices during the RFC process. -spp
