note Porculus <blockquote><i>perl 6 broke years worth of my work, changed all the one sigil operators to bizarre hieroglyphics (~~ is string cat because it looks like .. strings?), and reeked of intellectual theorycraft instead of a pragmatic tool for programmers in the real world.</i></blockquote> <p>This is the same reaction I have pretty much every time I look at a sample of Perl6 code: a mixture of "WTF?", "Ugh!", and "that wasn't broke! Why did they change that?".</p> <p>But if I've learned one thing in my life, it's that it's nearly always worth persevering with new things. Time and time again I recoil from some change; time and time again, a while later the reasons behind it suddenly make sense, and I find myself wondering how I ever lived without it.</p> <p>A Perl6 example: the weird new <c>for</c> syntax. God, I can scarcely express how much I hated that the first time I saw it. Then I read the justification for it, and then I looked back over my code and saw how many places I'd had to use some tedious workaround to iterate over two arrays in parallel, and suddenly I found myself wondering if there was a Perl6::For module on CPAN...</p> <p>I'm still far from converted -- God, I can scarcely express how much I hate Perl6's changes to sigil usage! -- but that little revelation has reminded me that the Perl6 design has not been based on changing stuff for the sake of it. I'm sure there's a good reason for the new sigil system, and when I have time to dip into Perl6 again I'm sure I'll find out what it is. (Though I hope it's something better than "to make the first ten minutes of Perl programming easier for dim-witted novices".)</p> 678649 678798