Re^2: What is Perl6?

[mojotoad]

To be fair, when confronted with a machine/OS, to ask "does it run (P|p)erl" is not an unfair question. In the perl5 sense, "things work". Unless there's CPAN dependencies, etc, which are solved in other ways.

I love languages. But will Perl6 "just work" on standard distros? Who knows. I hope so.

Historically, Perl has "just worked", as opposed to *very* persnickety backwards-compatibility-impaired 'other interpreted languages'.

Cheers,
Matt

[TimToady]

I think you've got some sampling bias in your definition of "just works". Perl does not "just work" in many places where Java, C#, JavaScript, and even (shudder) PHP "just work". We'd like to fix that so that Perl 6 "just works" all those places too.

[mojotoad]

This systems-hound (unix-ish expectations) is busted, fair and square.

I've recently had to do a bunch of perl5 work in the Win32 world (via Strawberry as it happens), including full-blown GUI support.

I ran into more stuff that broke perl than I would have ever imagined. But mostly, this is because the environment was breaking POSIX. Live and learn.

I think the primary point of my original comment was that I'd like to minimize those kinds of surprises (multi-platform abstraction) as well as minimize language surprises (i.e. sorry, this is not your flavor of perl6).

The test suite evolving around the current specification gives me hope.

Cheers,
Matt

[Anonymous Monk]

What are your thoughts on these comments in the Link about perl ?