note
adrianh
<blockquote><em>Because, for example, alternatives might be preferred in real world projects. This means less perl programming for us :(</em></blockquote>
<p>True. However, it won't be any worse than the current situation and Perl6 (or indeed Perl5) cannot be implemented in a sane manner on JVM or .NET. If you want to work on those VMs you will have to choose another language anyway.</p>
<blockquote><em>Whether they will help us write better software remains to be seen.</em></blockquote>
<p>It some areas I don't think there is any doubt that it will. For example, just the addition of <code>submethod</code> means that a whole bunch of code-reuse problems with Perl5 OO code just disappear or become a whole lot simpler.</p>
<blockquote><em>So far, parrot cannot handle everything perl5 does.</em></blockquote>
<p>True. However, there is nothing in the design of parrot that I can see that will make it slower than the Perl5 VM - and many things that will make it faster. I would be interested in knowing what features of Parrot you think will cause speed problems. I can't see any (and the developers seem to be spending a lot of time ensuring that there won't be.)</p>
<blockquote><em>As far as typing goes, the Python authors argue that this one of the reasons for Pythons success. I tend to agree.</em></blockquote>
<p>I do as well. If given a choice between a dynamically typed languages like Python/Perl/Ruby and a staticly typed system like Java/C++ I would choose the former any day of the week.</p>
<p>However, that's not the issue. <em>Perl6 is not becoming a statically typed language</em>. It has optional types that you can use if/when you need/want them. There are some techniques (e.g. multimethods) that you cannot have without some kind of type declarations.</p>
<p>Perl6's type system gives me more expressive power, and does not take anything away from the language. I can't see this as a bad thing.</p>
<p>It also might attract new people to Perl6 who are more used to coding in more strongly typed language.</p>
<blockquote><em>The java docs state that any new JVM implementation should start with good ideea of how JNI will work. I think it's a good advice that the Parrot developers should take.</em></blockquote>
<p>Why do you think they're not taking it?</p>
<p>As I said, a better way of interfacing to external code is one of the points on the [http://dev.perl.org/perl6/architecture|perl6 architecture document] and there is lots of [google://Perl6 NCI|active work] in exploring what this new API needs to do.</p>
<p>Is it finished yet? No - but from what I can see good progress is being made.</p>
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