Re: How to Sell Perl 6

[talexb]

With a beta of Perl 6 probably being less than two years away ..

Perl 6 seems to be like a mirage, enchanting, beautiful, desirable .. and always retreating, retreating. The number I always hear is '18 months' when anyone talks about when it will arrive.

I think the big change will happen when some of the key CPAN modules get ported or certified to Perl 6 compliant. Once we have modules that work, then we'll be able to write code that works. The corollary is that if there's no CGI.pm for Perl 6, there will be no Perl 6 CGIs.

Perl sure is quirky, but that's because (like the English language) it has many forebears. When I started doing a little shell programming recently, I often had two thoughts, "Hey! This is like Perl!", followed by "No, Perl is like shell." My awk experience predated (and led to) Perl, so at least I got that order correct.

I look forward to Perl 6 -- I made the transition from Assembler to C, and then from C to Perl (starting with the brand new 5.4 version). It won't be a language change, but it will definitely be a dialect change, but that suits, coming from a language designed by a linguist.

[Ovid]

I don't blame you for being a little frustrated at how long Perl 6 is taking to develop. However, it's not Duke Nukem style vaporware. The proof of this is on the Perl 6 mailing lists and the regular Apocalypses and Exegeses. There's considerable development being made and anyone can see the progress. There are already several languages running on Parrot, the beginnings of SDL binding, OO is beginning to emerge (it would have emerged sooner were it not for the incorporation of traits, but that's a Good Thing), etc. Admittedly, this has almost made Mozilla development look speedy, but once it hits the ground, it's going to find its feet pretty quickly.

[talexb]

I'm not really frustrated -- I think my attitude is more fatalistic. Perl 6 will arrive when it arrives. It's not vaporware -- it's just like a transporter beam that needs a bit of adjustment .. but I'm not worried about it.

I do know I'm going to have to turn my dial from practitioner over a few notches to student as Perl 6 firms up. I'm wondering if the gods have considered starting up a Perl 6 section on PM, or even if that has been discussed.

[kelan]

I'm wondering if the gods have considered starting up a Perl 6 section on PM, or even if that has been discussed.

Yes, it has, and there are probably others. The general consensus was that it would not be worthwhile to have a separate section for it. People with questions or discussions will just have to clarify which version, if there is confusion.

[hardburn]

The number I always hear is '18 months' when anyone talks about when it will arrive.

Which reminds me of this old quote: "In a ten year period, we can have an superb programming language. Except we can't control when the ten year period will begin."

The corollary is that if there's no CGI.pm for Perl 6, there will be no Perl 6 CGIs.

Plenty of people will probably keep hand-parsing CGI params even after they're using Perl6. Or maybe not. I suspect that most hand-parsed implementations are actually copy-and-pasted from whatever source the author orginally learned CGI programming from. They have nearly zero understanding of the line-noise regular expressions that go into even a relatively simple CGI param parser. That being the case, these code snippets are very likely to completely break under Perl6, and they won't know how to fix them. Which makes it an excelent point to show them how to do it properly. Either that, or they'll give up and go back to Perl5.