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Re: Why aren't you using Perl 6 yet?

by Anonymous Monk
on May 24, 2005 at 18:22 UTC ( [id://460122]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Why aren't you using Perl 6 yet?

Well, I'm in no rush to learn Perl 6. My reasons (or prejudices) in rough order, are:

1) Documentation Is the Perl6 specification even done yet? When I last read the apocolyses(sp?), they all raised more questions than they answered: Larry was unclear about what was going to change in the next apocoplyse, and what wasn't. Do we have a full language specification, and if so, where is it documented? Until that work is done, I don't really want to muck about with some language that's still somebody's toy. I just want the final product.

2) Perl6 itself I just didn't like most of what I read about it. It seems too big, too complicated, and gives people way too much rope to hang the maintenance coder with. I just know some idiot is going to do something stupid, like overload some subtly different unicode glyphs, instead of just naming functions normally. There were a few places where the language was made simpler or saner: but then more features were thrown into what was already a big kitchen-sink language; and I'm worried it will all collapse under the weight to the maintenance burden. It's hard enough to maintain perl5 code; with more complicated features, the messes are going to get more and more horrible to clean up.

3) Haskell. Pugs is implemented in haskell. I struggled with poor documention from haskell.org five years ago, and completely failed to learn haskell because I didn't know what any of the error messages meant. For a language that was supposed to be "more advanced", it was too much work to do simple tasks: I remember not being able to use the syntax I expected on several occasions, and not knowing if it was a bug in the interpreter, a mistake in my code, or some combination of the two. The language didn't have a newsgroup, the wiki hadn't seen any traffic for over a year, and I finally assumed the language was a dead-end, and gave up. Now, the prospect of getting entangled with haskell again makes my skin crawl. It's a prejudice, I know, but one based on past frustrations.

4) Copyright. My employer hires me to do programming work. Most of the programming work that I do belongs to them. Since I don't have fixed working hours (I'm a salaried employee), if I try to program "for myself", confusion could arise over which copyrights belong to me, and which to my employer. It's just a simpler legal position for all parties if I don't program at all outside of work.

So that's it. My reasons, or prejudices, or what have you. Take from them what you will.
--
Ytrew Q. Uiop

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