Re^2:So much like a natural language

[pbeckingham]

I don't think that ambiguity of grammar is what gives Perl 5 it's flexibility and natural feel. I think that Perl 6 - a larger language - will provide many more "ways to do it", and will possibly have even more of that quality you like.

My Perl 6 unease is that "once learned" clause you added to your statement about Perl 5. When Perl 6 is here, despite the excellent Exegeses and the years of discussion, we are all going to slide some way back down that learning curve.

[l3nz]

I wonder how far in the future is that "When Perl 6 is here" of yours. I would not start worrying today, anyway.... :-)

[pbeckingham]

Absolutely. I will not start worrying in 2004, and I won't be doing much worrying in 2005 either. First Parrot, then Ponie, then P6, and finally me, slipping and sliding trying to get traction on the curve.

[japhy]

I for one welcome a slight slide down the curve of learning. I don't want to sound too pretentious, but I'd like to learn more Perl, and short of ugly things like ioctl and shmget and whatever modules I haven't yet needed, there's not much I can think of. Sure, I could stand to increase my obfuscational abilities, but that's not practical.

And I could learn Ruby, which is similar to Perl but not Perl, but I wouldn't be using it. I want the enjoyment of discovery with this language, and I haven't had that for quite a few years.

[pbeckingham]

I'm not far enough up that curve to welcome a slide, but I know how you feel.

While Perl remains my language of choice, I did go off and learn Ruby. I highly recommend it, not that I want to try to use it at work, or supplant Perl, or even truly believe that it stands a chance against Perl and Python, but because there are some very, very nice things about that language, that made me think differently.

[japhy]

I learned some Ruby. Enough to write some programs that I wish could be translated easily into Perl. ;) Then I got jealous, and cursed the name of Ruby

One of the nicest features about Ruby is one of it smallest and perhaps least significant. That ending punctuation on methods is so visually appealing and powerful to me.

str = orig.chomp;  # chomp()s copy of orig, stores in str
orig.chomp!;       # chomp()s orig in-place

That just floored me. I wrote one really dumb program that exploited that. I made chomp? that basically returned whether the string would be changed by chomping it. What a cool feature. And so tiny!