Perl6, baby perl and nurturing environment

[stefp]

This is very much a non sequitur. I have never bought the concept of baby perl because ones has soon to deal with adult code. In a sense I realize this is a chance because I have long lived in a closed source world without the opportunity of seing adult code propagated by openness of various flavors of free software. But this is also a challenge, first to master it, than to get it accepted from people without such exposure. Even when Perl demonstrates a keen understanding of Natural Language Principles.

In the section "more is more" of your paper, speaking of the C++ language you critize the approach of teaching by subsetting. I am well aware that you strive to avoid the grammatical traps that you criticize in C++ but showed fixable. Larry and you choose the freeness of designing a new syntax instead of building on top of an existing one (unllike perl5 trapped in backward compatibility without any more acceptable degreea of liberty to grow) But really, does this notion of baby perl make sense without a nurturing motherwise environment? I am not speaking of social ones: perl mongers, YAPC (these two thanks to Kevin Lenzo and YAS), perl monks, and O'Reilly conference have been instrumental here. I am speaking of high level tools. Currently, we are trapped between Visual-Studio like environment or emacs/vi like. Even the bases, binding graphical toolit are not there. When KDE is getting a clear lead. The perl crowd is trapped in the oldish Tk or slowing moving to Gtk. I know that you, leaders, are already busy with the core of Perl but I feel that these outer peels of the onion don't get the attention they deserve... even if I see that a proof of concept Qt appli is bundled with parrot. Despite its long and useful life, Perl never got the exposure he desserve, and like linux did, must learn to be visible on the deskop

Note: I must confess I have not recently followed Activestate progress but their tools seemed top heavy last time I checked..

-- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki

PS: someone talked of two languages side by side. I have the opposite opinion, A5 hints how can regular perl and so called regexes can mix and interact so intimately. I am eager to see that in action in your exegis.

[Anonymous Monk]

I have never bought the concept of baby perl because ones has soon to deal with adult code.

To the contrary, it seems to me that most people who use Perl at some point never deal with, let alone learn to handle, "adult code". Interview people who list Perl on their resume (and actually used it) and see how many have not, for instance, learned how references and objects work.

Even though this is not a particularly esoteric feature either of Perl or programming, I am confident that you will find that most have not. And God forbid that you should ask about a feature like closures which has not been hyped in various big name languages for the last decade. Most people at least feel obligated to say that they have heard of OO and planned to learn it at some point...