My 2004 Perlish Wish

[pg]

If you give me a chance to make one wish, one Perlish wish. I would wish that, in 2004, Perl starts to allow OO objects being nicely shared and sync'd among threads, thus unleash the powerful conbination of multi-threading and OO.

What's your one Pelish wish for the coming year?

Happy New Year, Monks!

[BrowserUk]

I share your wish, but am resigned to this not being achievable with P5. I continue to hold out hope for P6, but it may be touch and go.

In the more general sense, I want programming tools that will allow me to convert the pictures in my head, into prototype code more quickly and more easily, but that will also stand up to the rigeurs (sp?) of translating those prototypes into production quality code too.

That means I want the intuative conciseness of Perl, with the ability to achieve performance close to that of C. I think this is (one of) the aim(s) of P6, and I hope it comes to fruition.

If P6 becomes what I think it is has the potential to become, then it will allow me (or others) to write the other tools I think are necessary to achieve the next level of productivity as a programmer. Something I think is sorely over due.

[Ovid]

Perl6

(Though I'll settle for autoboxing being moved into the core)

[duff]

Though I share your wish (but I'll not settle for autoboxing!), I don't expect Perl6 until 2005 sometime. That way I get to delay my disappointment by a couple of years or be extremely happy if it arrives before the end of 2005 :-)

[Ovid]

I just finished compiling Perl with the autoboxing patch and already I've discovered that the author's nifty examples don't seem to translate very cleanly. And having @array->sort delegated to a SCALAR class is just wrong :/

And yeah, I also don't expect Perl6 next year, but I figured a wish list was a perfect place to have a wish :)

[Wassercrats]

At some point, I'll be adding multithreading to my site map builder/link checker (currently, it's just the former). I think all decent link checkers have that ability, and I want to be competitive. I know nothing about doing this, except for something I vaguely recall reading about it dealing with sockets, which I have no idea how to use. I'm not really researching this right now, but if your "powerful conbination of multi-threading and OO" wish would help me achieve this, then I wish for it too.

[jeffa]

If you happen to be using an operating system that implements fork, then you don't need threads to achieve parallelism (in fact, some programmers spells threads F-O-R-K). I would look into LWP::Parallel (well, the ParallelUserAgent distro, to be exact). In the meantime, here is an extremely trivial, bare bones script with issues that uses HTML::LinkExtractor (think HTML::LinkExtor::Simple) and fork to check links in parallel (Quiz: what limitation is allowing us to achieve parallelism even though only one processor may be all that's available to us? ;))

# be careful with this ... a fork is executed for every link found
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::LinkExtractor;

my $link = HTML::LinkExtractor->new;

$link->parse(\*DATA);

my @href = map $_->{href}, grep { $_->{tag} eq 'a' } @{$link->links};

for (@href) {
   next if fork;
   my $valid = head($_) ? 'good' : 'bad';
   warn "$_ is $valid\n";
   exit;
}

__DATA__
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.perlmonks.org">Perlmonks</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.yahoo.com">Yahoo</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bad.link.number.one">Bad #1</a></li>
<li><a href="file://not.there"></a>Bad #2</li>
</ul>

Mr. Peabody Explains Fork

[petesmiley]

A bit late but....
I wish for all of the people who have made Perl great to have a good and successful year.

I'm not ambitious, I just realize that people who do good things are not something to take for granted.

smiles

[Abigail-II]

My wish is that the Perl6 project folds, and the energy is put in developping Perl5 further.

Abigail

[shotgunefx]

I find a lot of what's coming with Perl6 interesting but I certainly have my doubts. Right now, I'm taking a wait and see approach, but I fear perl6 will end a case of overambition. I'd love to have continuations, coroutines, macros etc.., but I think I'd like it better if they were in more of a Perl5 package.

[Aristotle]

Larry said if the team weren't working on Perl6, they'd inadvertently be trying to retrofit the same things into Perl5. Would you really prefer Perl5 to get soiled with the things you don't like about Perl6?

[duffbeer703]

Isn't one of the main cool things about Perl6 the Parrot "master" virtual machine? The VM that's supposed to slice, dice and be a platform for every language from Perl to Prolog?

I hope that I'm wrong, but I have a feeling that the Perl6 people are trying to do too much at once. How many years will it take to delouse a complex language AND multi-language VM and produce something ready for safe production use?

[Abigail-II]

But at least they would have to be backwards compatible, so one wouldn't have to change the way one has been programming in for decades.

Abigail

[BrowserUk]

Your not of the opinion that the P5 sources have just reached the point where further enhancement involves so much hacking, conditional compilation, and intertwining of the new with the old that it has effectively been rendered almost impossible to maintain never mind extend?

[Abigail-II]

In the three and a half years that the Perl6 project is on its way, perl5 has produced 5.6.1, 5.6.2, 5.8.0, 5.8.1, 5.8.2, and even 5.9.0. In the mean time, perl6 hasn't even decided how their operators will look like.

Granted, modifying the perl5 sources is hard, but that's caused a large part by having to be backwards compatible. If, just like perl6, that condition could be lifted, it would be easier to develop 5.10 or 5.12.

Perl5 is evolving. Perl6 isn't there.

Abigail