Re: Book RFC - Migrating to Perl 6
Good idea. A fat new O'reilly tome will go some way to capturing mind share for perl6. Gathering ideas wiki-style is also very Web2.0. Perhaps perl6 could be marketed as such, what with the development style - Perl6, the first Web2.0 programming language. In any case, if the book comes out around the same time Perl 6.0.0 comes out there's still plenty of time ;-) On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 22:11:18 +0200 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd like to start by saying DON'T PANIC! I'm not going to write a book on Perl 6 ;-) Luckily we have people with much more enlish-fu, structured-thought-fu, and general get-it-done-fu... Now let's talk a bit about them: Today Geoff Broadwell raised a book idea for discussion on #perl6. The result was this wiki page: http://pugs.kwiki.org/?MigratingToPerl6 Essentially Geoff's idea was that the book will come out around the same time as Perl 6.0.0, and will be the guide for perl 5 programmers looking to swallow the Perl 6 pill as easily as possible. The wiki page illustrates how we think it will be structured, and how we think it should be written. Please post feedback and criticism on the list, #perl6 or the wiki page. -- () Yuval Kogman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xEBD27418 perl hacker /\ kung foo master: : neeyah!
Re: Book RFC - Migrating to Perl 6
On Oct 15, 2005, at 7:39 AM, Rutger Vos wrote: Good idea. A fat new O'reilly tome will go some way to capturing mind share for perl6. Gathering ideas wiki-style is also very Web2.0. Perhaps perl6 could be marketed as such, what with the development style - Perl6, the first Web2.0 programming language. I would suggest we avoid trying to link Perl6 with Web2.0 in people's minds, at least at first. One of the uphill battles that I'm really tired of fighting is convincing people that Perl is good for more than CGIs and quick-n-dirty system administration hacks. We don't need to throw fuel on that fire by nicheing ourselves right at the start. --Dks
Re: Book RFC - Migrating to Perl 6
On Oct 15, 2005, at 9:57 AM, David Storrs wrote: I would suggest we avoid trying to link Perl6 with Web2.0 in people's minds, at least at first. One of the uphill battles that I'm really tired of fighting is convincing people that Perl is good for more than CGIs and quick-n-dirty system administration hacks. We don't need to throw fuel on that fire by nicheing ourselves right at the start. Well, I first learned Perl (Perl 4 at the time) so that I could use it for CGI, and my interest in Perl started to wane in part because I had moved on to other things. I've been doing a lot of work in an ancient language known as MUMPS for the last 10 years or so. It's a language providing, among other things, a rich set of string handling functions, patterns, hierarchical associative arrays, etc. Perl seemed attractive as a more modern (read: Algol-like) alternative to M/MUMPS. But I never ended up using it as much as I expected I would. I think what started me looking back at Perl was developing some UI prototypes in Java (Swing). Maybe I just don't get it, but I found that the degree of coupling between presentation logic and business logic to be appalling. Despite my best efforts, adding a few fields to a simple patient lookup seemed to involve a lot more work than it ought to (I work on medical information systems for the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs). M. J. Dominus' book Higher Order Perl caught my eye (maybe because I have long been interested in computability theory, and maybe because I had a good time learning LISP in college). I know that Perl isn't a functional language, but I was very impressed with what could be done with the language. (And now that I've learned about pugs, I wonder if maybe I shouldn't run off and learn Haskell!) Anyway, I've been thinking a lot lately about maintainability of large scale systems. about 5 years ago, I was given the task of parsing through millions of lines (literally) of source code and building what is essentially a dependency graph. That really made an impression on me. It just seems that no one ever should have to do anything like that. Okay, so maybe this is another niche, but it seems to me that complex systems (and maybe health care in particular) is a natural area for a language like Perl, and one well removed from CGI. === Gregory Woodhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] Einstein was a giant. He had his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground. --Richard P. Feynman
Book RFC - Migrating to Perl 6
I'd like to start by saying DON'T PANIC! I'm not going to write a book on Perl 6 ;-) Luckily we have people with much more enlish-fu, structured-thought-fu, and general get-it-done-fu... Now let's talk a bit about them: Today Geoff Broadwell raised a book idea for discussion on #perl6. The result was this wiki page: http://pugs.kwiki.org/?MigratingToPerl6 Essentially Geoff's idea was that the book will come out around the same time as Perl 6.0.0, and will be the guide for perl 5 programmers looking to swallow the Perl 6 pill as easily as possible. The wiki page illustrates how we think it will be structured, and how we think it should be written. Please post feedback and criticism on the list, #perl6 or the wiki page. -- () Yuval Kogman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xEBD27418 perl hacker /\ kung foo master: : neeyah! pgpeiR4qHQZMr.pgp Description: PGP signature
