Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6?

But I clearly remember the first stabbing pain that told me it was going to be something different than first advertised.

I confess I don't quite understand this. Than first advertised by whom? As far as I'm concerned, the first advertisement for Perl 6 was simply that we were going to look at Perl as a community and fix everything that needed fixing, and that it would certainly include making Perl powerful enough that we could write its parser in Perl itself. If things have changed from that, it's perhaps a sense of reality about how many things there were to fix. I expected maybe 20 RFCs, and we got 361. Our eyes were opened to the fact that pretty much everyone had tunnel vision about how to change Perl for the better, and that the sum of the community's pain was much greater than any individual piece of it. To me, we are still precisely on the originally announced target of having a community rewrite of Perl. We just didn't understand the scale of what that meant.

We also didn't understand the full ramifications of what it means to have a Perl 6 compiler written in Perl 6. Among other things, it means you don't really have to care whether the backend is using Haskell or Parrot or the latest and greatest VMs from MS and Sun. The current Haskell implementation of pugs is a nice prototype, but in the long run, Haskell is just another engine to run on.

As mentioned elsewhere, fglock has already bootstrapped a mini-Perl 6 in itself. And we're a goodly part of the way to having a full Perl 6 parser written in full-up Perl 6. See the standard grammar, which we can currently parse, but not quite run yet. But it's getting there. (Would you trust a precompiled compiler written in Perl 6?) Once we get to the point of being able to run it (on any of the engines), things will converge rather rapidly from there on.

Comment on Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6?

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Re^3: What's wrong with Perl 6? by zentara (Archbishop) on May 11, 2007 at 12:18 UTC
*I confess I don't quite understand this. Than first advertised by whom?* Somehow this reminds me of TV advertising. :-) What I remember (subjectively and from a perspective of a wannabe on the sidelines) was that Perl6 was going to be this great revolution in interpreted languages, where everything was going to be built on the Parrot ( a universal assembly language), and this would allow for Python, Perl5, Ruby (and whoever else wanted in) code to be seamlessly inlined into Perl6 code. Now if my impressions were wrong, you can point that out, but I think many others were given the same impression. Maybe it was just part of the Parrot hype.... and Perl6 shouldn't be blamed for it....but it all has become confusing to me. Can you estimate how long it will be before Perl6 can be compiled from C, like Perl5? I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum	[reply]
Re^4: What's wrong with Perl 6? by chromatic (Archbishop) on May 11, 2007 at 17:47 UTC
Can you estimate how long it will be before Perl6 can be compiled from C, like Perl5? First someone would have to start working on an implementation of Perl 6 in C. To my knowledge, no one has. I certainly wouldn't. Yuck.	[reply]
Re^5: What's wrong with Perl 6? by demerphq (Chancellor) on May 14, 2007 at 11:22 UTC
I cant figure out why you think such an attitude is in Perl 6's best interests. If it isnt written in C (or perhaps C++) its going to find itself at a disadvantage competing in the marketplace with languages that are. IMO if Perl 6 doesnt end up with a C implementation it will end up as one of many interesting but ultimately trivial footnotes in the history of computing. And that not that an outcome that I would like to see. --- $world=~s/war/peace/g	[reply]
Re^6: What's wrong with Perl 6? by chromatic (Archbishop) on May 14, 2007 at 15:12 UTC
Re^7: What's wrong with Perl 6? by jdporter (Paladin) on May 14, 2007 at 15:43 UTC
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Re^3: What's wrong with Perl 6? by shmem (Chancellor) on May 14, 2007 at 19:45 UTC
Among other things, it means you don't really have to care whether the backend is using Haskell or Parrot or the latest and greatest VMs from MS and Sun. The current Haskell implementation of pugs is a nice prototype, but in the long run, Haskell is just another engine to run on. Well, sometimes if fever gets me, I'm dreaming of a Perl 6 implementation in FORTH, but that's perhaps just my delirating style... ah, a perl chip! That would be IT! :-) --shmem _($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo. G°\ / /\_¯/(q / ---------------------------- \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."· ");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}	[reply]


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