Re^2: My 2004 Perlish Wish

[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?

[Aristotle]

Parrot is already shaping up great and shaping up rapidly. The VM will be mature long before the language it is destined to carry. This is the main advantage of doing Perl6 and Parrot separately. It's likely that several other languages will have been ported to and stabilized on Parrot by the time the first serious effort at implementing Perl6 for real even takes place.

[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

[Aristotle]

How? Fixing OO is just one example that would require breaking old habits anyway, whether it happens under the guise of Perl5 or is deferred to a wholly new design.

[Abigail-II]

I don't understand what you are saying.

Perl5 will be backwards compatible, so even if OO or whatever is "fixed", why does that require breaking old habits? (And what's wrong with old habits anyway?)

Abigail