Re: The Future - Shipping Applications Written in Perl

[sierrathedog04]

I am glad you are looking forward to Perl 6, because I am frightened of it.

A preprocessor that goes through Perl 5 code and generates Perl 6 code that the 6 interpreter can read? How buggy could that be? For the near future Perl's developers will do everything twice -- write the new code, then write routines that convert old versions of Perl to the new one.

No other language that I know of uses such a model. Not the current Perl, nor Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, Oracle PL/SQL, whatever. What if the Perl 6 preprocessing model turns out to be a bad way of writing computer languages?

The idea is supposed to be that you write once, in Perl 5 let's say, and run anywhere, on Perl 6, 7, 8, 9 whatever.

Write once, run anywhere didn't work very well for Java applets. They seemed to break on every new browser/JVM combination. I hope it works better for the new improved Perl.

Maybe I will sit out this next round of Perl improvements. I still only use half the features in Perl 5.x, and I have been coding Perl for a year.