Re: Next Apocalpyse/Exegesis

I've seen Larry's first draft of A4 and it's brilliant. We're working through a few rough edges and that will continue on Perl Whirl '02 next week. I'll write E4 on the ship (no holidays for Perl serfs!) and the A4/E4 pair should appear late Feb.

Re: Worry's about Larry and Damian muddling something fundamental

We worry about that too. But we have Nat Torkington, Jarrko Hietaniemi, Dan Sugalski, Simon Cozens, Hugo van der Sanden, and Jon Orwant on the design review team. Very few mistakes survive that calibre of scrutiny.

Then we have the entire Perl community giving us feedback on the decisions once they're made public. And we listen to that feedback very closely. Remember how the <> input operator was going to go away? Well, the outcry was so overwhelming (and so many good points made in its favour) that Larry reversed that decision.

The future of Perl is (collectively) in very safe hands.

Re: Scary changes in Perl 6

I have an article in the next Perl Journal (out next month) entitled "And Now For Something Completely Similar..." that illustrates that Perl 6 is going to be very much like Perl 5 for a large number of coders. And is going to feel entirely Perlish, even where it does differ from Perl 5.

I take five real-world programs (written by members of the Perl 6 design team) and port them to Perl 6. The gimmick is, of course, how little these typical (small) Perl programs actually change.

Edited 2002-01-10 by dvergin to fix use of square brackets