Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

http://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html?page=1

by joslin01 • 14 years ago

151 94 14 years ago

perl.com

aoprisan• 14 years ago

tl;dr; So basically Perl 6 will force strict and warnings by default.

perlgeek2• 14 years ago

It does already; no need to use future tense.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

An actual tl;dr for this article would be almost as long as the article itself. There's lots of good stuff in there. However, if the length of the article intimidates you, I suggest starting at the sentence before the heading "early binding; late binding". Everything before that is historical perspective -- interesting but not as useful as the rest of the article.

densh• 14 years ago

I'm a python programmer and this article really makes me interested in Perl. The only problem is that Perl 6 haven't shipped yet in more then 4 years since this article was written, have it?

sirn• 14 years ago

I asked the same question few years ago and the answer back then was "there will never be official Perl 6, anything that implements Perl 6 specification is Perl 6." I don't know about other implementations, but latest Rakudo Star[1] was released just a month ago.

[1] https://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads

joelbd• 14 years ago

I'm not sure there will be an official Perl 6 shipment. I did recently download the February Rakudo Star (which compiles Perl 6 into Parrot VM bytecode), and I've enjoyed playing around with it. Fair disclosure: I've been writing and loving Perl 5 since 1999.

The difficulty right now for anyone from a Perl 5 background who would otherwise jump into Perl 6, is that running your Perl 6 program is really, really slow. I don't know if it's the compile step or execution or something else.

chromatic5• 14 years ago

Ignore the semantic games other responses play. If you're asking "Has anyone released an implementation of Perl 6 that's suitable for everyday use by someone who isn't interested in developing Perl 6 itself?", the answer is no.

smacktoward• 14 years ago

On the positive side, when that implementation of Perl 6 does arrive, it will be delivered to you by flying car free of charge.

cygx• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, did you finally give Niecza a try or are you still ignoring it out of opposition to anything .NET?

I do not (only) ask to be a smart mouth -- I'm genuinely interested in how it rates on your personal scale of production-readiness...

irahul5• 14 years ago

I asked the same question about a year and half ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568

At that time, you weren't so "perl 6 is not ready" camp. What changed?

lukeschlather• 14 years ago

One of my big takeaways from this article is Larry's view on the history of language. He was quite serious when he compared Ada to English, and I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? Might it be a bigger language than English? Might the notion of a "small" programming language being the ideal be somewhat quaint when a CPU with 4GB of integrated memory dances on the head of a pin?

Anyway, what I'm getting that is 4 years is a pretty short amount of time now that Larry Wall has made me think about it.

bdunbar• 14 years ago

I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form?

There is a really excellent SF novel 'A Deepness in the Sky' by Vernor Vinge.

It's a few thousand years from now, and one really important job is "Programmer-Archeologist". Their job is to grub around in libraries, find an already existing solution, adapt it to present needs. This is important because without quality automation running your spaceship, you could die.

There are hints that some of these libraries are really old: an off-hand comment is made referencing what must be unix epoch.

kamaal12• 14 years ago

Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match.

Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time.

Compared to all languages in its class, Perl hasn't broken backwards compatibility since past 25 years. Python had to break it for some very simple syntax changes. Perl has never done it, not even once in past 25 years. That is quite a feat considering so much syntax has been added to the language since then. Perl 5 has also found a way to add more syntax without dealing with the core by modules like Devel::Declare.

So Perl evolution is set for many years. You will see it evolve grow. New neat ideas and many like Moose will find their way into Perl.

Basically what makes it special is its hackable, flexible and extensible. And such languages generally stay around for a long time.

sciurus2• 14 years ago

If you're interested, skim through Modern Perl [0].I really like this description from this Amazon review [1]:

"I had a hard time characterizing this wonderful book. It explains the fundamentals, but it's not an introductory book like Learning Perl. It covers almost every feature of the Perl 5 language, but it's not a reference book like Programming Perl. It explains common idioms, but it's not a guide to Perl 5 fluency like Effective Perl Programming. It contains many practical suggestions, but it's not a book of tips like Perl Hacks.

I can only describe it as a "textbook". If I had to pick a single book to teach Perl 5, this is the one I'd choose. As I read it, I was reminded of the first time I read K&R (C Programming Language) and how much learning was packed into it. (It's the only college programming text I still have). In a slim 250 pages, Modern Perl obsoletes most of my shelf of Perl 5 books. It's not intended for a complete novice to programming (any more than K&R was), but in the hands of a competent programmer or a diligent student it will teach everything that one needs to know to write Perl 5 well."

[0] http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EAHI4GHDLQ96/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...

read_wharf4• 14 years ago

What a great book. I'm skimming the ebook now, and it makes me want to pick up Perl again.

Anyone aware of a similar book for Python? For when I, you know, come back to Python after straying into Perl for a few years?

danssig5• 14 years ago

The OP was asking about Perl 6, not Perl 5. Perl 6 has enough interesting things that a python programmer might get interested but Perl5 is a pain to use (coming from the python perspective).

kamaal12• 14 years ago

Perl 5 has nothing to do with Perl 6 development or even releases. Even after Perl 6 is released Perl 5 will still continue to evolve and grow.

At the moment Perl 6 specification gives a good evolution map for Perl 5 development. So you need not to have to ever worry about Perl 6.

Perl 5 is a solid language in itself. Perl has been amazingly useful since almost 25 years now. And anybody who denies this is simply trolling. Its useful for almost anything to everything. From scripting, to application development, to prototyping to building reliable applications in any domain.

Perl adapts to nearly every programming paradigm out there. Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible.

You also get to benefit from the community experience and knowledge accumulated over years. You get the power of CPAN. There are also amazing resources to learn Perl.

Its a tool that you will never stop being in love with.

Those of us who have used Perl and pushed its boundaries to get amazing stuff done over years, even now can't write down words to describe its greatness. We can only tell you how great it is, but when you see it yourself you will know it.

But the position of any new Perl programmer is enviable to say at the least. He stands at the gates of a city which is going to take him to places he has never seen and experiences he has never been through. Most of them are going to change his life for ever.

creamyhorror• 14 years ago

I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of course, if it's still the best-of-breed then.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible.

My first programming job was in Perl back in the late 90's. Loved it, but I have to say that the OO facilities left something to be desired. I found them fatiguing. It took Java, then Smalltalk for me to really get OO. Perl requires too much mastery of mechanism just to do objects, so it's not the best environment for learning OO.

danssig5• 14 years ago

I don't generally see sales pitches of this level on sites actually selling something.

>And anybody who denies this is simply trolling.

Logical fallacy: Appeal to emotion. "My argument cannot be argued with because " is always a logical fallacy. "amazingly useful" is subjective, so of course it can be argued and doing so is not trolling but perfectly reasonable. Don't make claims you don't wish to back up.

>Its useful for almost anything to everything. From scripting, to application development, to prototyping to building reliable applications in any domain.

Logical fallacy: Misleading vividness. While what you say may be true, you've just described a programming language. There is nothing in this sales pitch that is perl specific.

>Perl adapts to nearly every programming paradigm out there.

This one is a better claim. The proper term is "multi-paradigm". Most (all?) Lisp dialects are also multi-paradigm, among various other languages.

>Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible.

"Amazingly flexible" is subjective. For example, a Smalltalk or Lisp programmer isn't going to be impressed (nor would programmers of Self, IO, etc., etc.).

Easy to learn can be tested to some degree and I believe you'll find the data against you. It would be an interesting to catalog the kinds of questions that get asked about the various languages. In my anecdotal experience, people start having problems with perl right at the beginning with e.g. how variables work.

Extensible is again "Misleading vividness". I can think of more languages that have a similar level of extensibility than those that do not.

>You also get to benefit from the community experience and knowledge accumulated over years.

Misleading vividness.

>You get the power of CPAN.

Overemphasized. Use a JVM-language (e.g. Clojure), for example, and you'll get the power of any open source JVM-language code ever written.

>There are also amazing resources to learn Perl.

Again, if you look at popular languages today there are few that wouldn't tick this box.

>Its a tool that you will never stop being in love with.

This claim is just ridiculous and wrong. I used perl professionally for over half a decade. At first I didn't care that much one way or the other. I was a C++ programmer and this was easier in some cases (but less flexible in other ways that I was used to exploiting). But as the years went on I grew to hate the language more and more until I just couldn't bare it anymore. I hated the backwards defaults (e.g. dynamic variables are fantastic. But as a default? wtf?), how ugly sigils look in code, the embarrassing "OO" syntax at the time and, one of the worst, how the community was constantly trying to prove they were relevant (obviously still the case). You could never mention Perl online or around Perl people without having to listen to the same tired tautologies about how incredibly powerful it is (wtf have you been using to think this?), etc.

So no, it's not a tool you'll never stop being in love with. This is the "Mind projection fallacy". You feel that way, but the vast sea of perl developers who abandoned ship for Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. obviously don't.

>Those of us who have used Perl and pushed its boundaries to get amazing stuff done over years, even now can't write down words to describe its greatness.

More "Misleading vividness". We all have stories like this in our favorite languages, but practitioners of other languages don't seem to feel compelled to post them anywhere and everywhere.

>We can only tell you how great it is, but when you see it yourself you will know it.

Appeal to mysticism. Sure we will.

>But the position of any new Perl programmer is enviable to say at the least.

Hah! If you had just said "Programmer" I would have found this an inspiring sentiment, but Perl programmer? No. I don't envy several months of "wtf" (e.g. the first time you figure out that your code accidentally applies ++ to a var that has a string in it and instead of crashing so you detect this immediately it does something with it).

agentgt4• 14 years ago

Programming is not hard. Getting people to buy your product or give you money... that's hard.

jrockway7• 14 years ago

Being bad at programming is not hard, anyway.

agentgt4• 14 years ago

I knew I was going to get downvoted to oblivion for that comment. But I still firmly believe it.

People are much harder to deal with. Much more dynamic. I'm confident the computer would not have downvoted me :)

BTW you apparently have a gazillion repo's in github but no blog ... writing is much harder than programming IMHO.

molecule• 14 years ago

wherein Larry Wall foresees the future: "I think when the new JavaScript engines come out we'll probably see renewed interest in a JavaScript backend." - December 6, 2007.

sciurus2• 14 years ago

By "backend" he meant something to run Perl 6 on.

perlgeek2• 14 years ago

And he was write. Perlito compiles subsets of both Perl 5 and Perl 6 to Javascript.

neutronicus• 14 years ago

Interesting to see him talking about multiple dispatch. I wonder what the thinks of Clojure? And CLOS, of course.

kamaal12• 14 years ago

Moose has borrowed some features from CLOS - http://moose.iinteractive.com/

You might find it interesting to use it.

perigrin• 14 years ago

Multiple Dispatch however is implemented in the extension MooseX::MultiMethods for various reasons to do with robustness.

brlewis3• 14 years ago

Quote: By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals.

I would think that by 2007 Larry Wall would have seen DrScheme (now DrRacket). You can't get a better onramp than that.

jrockway7• 14 years ago

Kids learning about computers have a slightly different set of problems to solve than programmers being paid to program. The hard part of programming is integrating with the real world; DrScheme solves that problem by making its own world.

brlewis3• 14 years ago

Do you have in mind a particular integration with the real world that is language-specific, but where DrScheme would not help a professional programmer ramp up familiarity with a Schemey way of doing it?

I think I disagree with you, but have to understand what you're arguing to be sure.

tomrod• 14 years ago

I've always liked Matlab's distinction between a function and a script. (Aye, many would call Matlab a scripting language).

Simply put, a function can map arbitrarily, and a script has the mapping and parameters provided!

At least, that's when you get into the scientific computing paradigm, as I understand it.

zoowar• 14 years ago

Perl has outlived its utility.

killa_bee• 14 years ago

At the risk of being annoying, virtually all the research done in linguistics departments anywhere in the world is research in the cognitive science of language, so a social science, not a humanity. This certainly includes Berkeley around 1970 or so (assuming that's when Wall was there).

fudged2• 14 years ago

"X is hard, let's go Y"

Is this a reference to consultant_barbie on reddit, or is this meme more widespread?

bgilroy262• 14 years ago

Nope that's it! I think it's a different barbie though : Teen Talk Barbie.

itsameta4• 14 years ago

It's a Simpsons reference. There's a Malibu Stacy doll that says, "Math is hard, let's go shopping!"

I'm sure consultant_barbie is referencing the same.

fudged2• 14 years ago

Wow, did not know! Thank you!

netbyte3• 14 years ago

As a new programmer, should I wait for Perl 6, or just learn Perl 5, this article makes Perl 6 look quite compelling.

joslin01• 14 years ago

netbyte3• 14 years ago

Thanks!

masak2• 14 years ago

You should never "wait" for a programming language. :) I say this as someone who is deeply involved in Perl 6 development.

Learn Perl 5 if you want to learn how a full-featured, complete, and liberating-to-use programming language works.

Check out Perl 6 if you want to see what some of us are building, and if you value ideas as such, even when they haven't all been put together into a finished, polished product.

netbyte3• 14 years ago

I don't think Rakudo works on windows well anyway

atdt• 14 years ago

We think about extensibility a lot. We think about languages we don't know how to think about yet. But leaving spaces in the grammar for new languages is kind of like reserving some of our land for national parks and national forests. Or like an archaeologist not digging up half the archaeological site because we know our descendants will have even better analytical tools than we have.

This quote, and what little I've sampled of Perl 6, reminds me of a few lines from the movie Wonder Boys:

Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices? [...] And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices. At all.

zeroonetwothree• 14 years ago

The book is significantly better...

(yes, I have nothing to add)

hashfold• 14 years ago

Scripting? its another language used to program.

In my opinion, none of the language will solve the problems with programming or bad programs. The only thing which could help programmers is the way they think of the solution and how they approach to it. Thinking about long term solution for a given problem may help.

Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

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