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Perl Programming IT Technology

Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community 123

LostDiver writes "Computerworld Australia caught up recently with Larry Wall of Patch and Perl fame. He talks about the development of Perl as 'scratching an itch,' a release date for Perl 6 (Christmas day, year unknown) and beauty versus practicality. Computerworld also has some more information on the upcoming Perl 6. A while back they interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame as well." jamie pointed out a interesting, related video of a presentation by Clay Shirky from last year's Supernova conference in which he discusses why the Perl community (or any web community) drives progress and innovation.
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Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community

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  • by psy0rz ( 666238 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @12:05PM (#26111029) Homepage
    they wont be dropping regex completely. from tfa:

    Perl 6 promises to put the "regular" back into regular expression. "We have more powerful primitives in Perl 6," Wall said. "There's no more /x switch to enable extended syntax. No more mode switches like /s and "dot" (.) now means match any character. There's no /m modifier and we've regularised the brackets so {} always mean embedded code."

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @12:29PM (#26111157)

    They didn't drop regexes at all. They've actually generalized them into context-free grammars, and these CFGs are a core part of the language.

    If anything, the problem with perl6 is they added way too much.

  • by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @01:27PM (#26111549)

    Take a look at the November 2008 TIOBE index top ten:

                Position Position Programming Ratings Delta Nov
                Nov 2008 Nov 2007 Language Nov 2008 2007
                1 1 Java 20.299% -0.24%
                2 2 C 15.276% +1.31%
                3 4 C++ 10.357% +1.61%
                4 3 (Visual) Basic 9.270% -0.96%
                5 5 PHP 8.940% +0.25%
                6 7 Python 5.140% +0.91%
                7 8 C# 4.026% +0.11%
                8 11 Delphi 4.006% +1.55%
                9 6 Perl 3.876% -0.86%
                10 10 JavaScript 2.925% 0.00%

    You can read the rest of the article [perl.org] here...

  • by wootest ( 694923 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @01:38PM (#26111619)

    The version that brought LINQ was .NET 3.5, with C# 3.0. .NET 3.0 was just the Vista technologies ("WinFX": WF, CardSpace, WCF, WPF and arguably also WTF) and didn't affect any of the languages in any way - just a bunch of new namespaces. .NET 4.0 will deemphasize LINQ to SQL in favor of LINQ to Entities, which hooks LINQ up to Entity Framework, a more solid (but as of yet woefully "1.0") mapping framework on its own. As with everything Microsoft, it'll probably live on for ages.

    LINQ to SQL is more of a joy to use, but it's a joy to use because it has less syntax, and it has less syntax because it tries to abstract less. Entity Framework tries to abstract more (like abstract away most many-to-many junction tables where the connection itself doesn't have properties) to the point where it is intelligent enough to handle joins for you, and it demands you to be far more explicit about lazy-loading data across relationships (which is a good thing). But it's not entirely there yet unless every query *always* produces an instance of a known type from the database.

  • by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @02:31PM (#26111951) Homepage

    Why?

    It's also two keystrokes shorter. What's wrong about borrowing good ideas from other languages? (I'd tell you what's wrong about borrowing bad ideas from other languages, but you didn't ask.)

    You're also years out of date on the string concatenation operator. I leave it as an exercise for readers to form their own conclusions about the accuracy of the rest of your post.

  • Re:Christmas? (Score:5, Informative)

    by BenLeeImp ( 1347831 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @03:30PM (#26112289)
    You are hugely mistaken. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html [perl.org]
  • Re:Christmas? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:28PM (#26112703)

    That would be because you're a fucking idiot and they answered that question so fucking long ago that no one with half a brain doesn't know the answer already.

    Perl 6 Myths [openfoundry.org]

    From that page in HUGE LETTERS:

    Perl 6 can use CPAN modules.

    There you go. Question answered. TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO.

    Why your post got modded up I'll never know.

  • Re:Christmas? (Score:5, Informative)

    by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:47PM (#26112837) Homepage

    I'm not sure how much of that applies to modules, though.

    All of it.

    Can Perl 6 code use a Perl 5 module?

    If you use a Perl 6 implementation which supports Perl 5, yes.

    Does the Perl 6 converter work on modules?

    Yes, if they're pure-Perl.

    Given that the object system is getting an overhaul in Perl 6, does that break OO-based modules?

    No.

    Is Perl 6 source-code compatible with the native code stubs that many modules, for example database drivers and GUI libraries, require?

    That depends on the Perl 6 implementation. The answer is probably no, but there's no reason someone couldn't write a converter for the basic XS uses.

  • Re:Christmas? (Score:3, Informative)

    by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:25PM (#26113685) Homepage

    If I've understood it correctly, Perl 6 will be able to call library functions directly, without a lot of fuss.

    Rakudo [rakudo.org] (Perl 6 on Parrot) can do this now.

  • Re:Christmas? (Score:5, Informative)

    by cxreg ( 44671 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:35PM (#26113805) Homepage Journal

    Interesting omission:

    $ grep "/python" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
    168

    $ grep "/ruby" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
    23

    $ grep "/perl" /usr/bin/* | wc -l
    570

  • Re:Christmas? (Score:2, Informative)

    by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:50PM (#26114507) Homepage

    Perl 6 is supposedly coming out ...someday.

    The next stable release of Rakudo [rakudo.org] (Perl 6 in Parrot) comes out next Tuesday. This will be the 24th stable monthly release of Perl 6 on Parrot in a row. You can also see daily Rakudo spectest progress [rakudo.de], if you like.

  • Parrot (Score:3, Informative)

    by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @08:32PM (#26114833) Homepage

    In addition to what the other /.ers have said, bear in mind that one of the main targets for Perl 6 to run on is Parrot a "one-VM to rule them all" multi language VM.

    Thus, not only will the binding be accessible to Perl, they would be accessible to any other language targeting Parrot VM.

    (Think of something remotely like JVM or Mono/.NET's CLR except that, unlike microsoft's CLR, Parrot is designed from the ground up with all the complexities of modern latest-gen dynamic languages in mind)

    Where the things get even more interesting is that the Ruby community is interested in using Parrot as their main VM.
    So Parrot would also cure Ruby's problem at the same time.

    Also, some of the python users are interested in creating yet another python implementation targeting parrot. And some fans are trying to create a PHP compiler for Parrot. Haskell coders are also involved a lot in the development of both Perl6 and Parrot. Thus Parrot has indeed serious chances of becoming the central interconnection point for lots of modern dynamic languages.

  • by rubypossum ( 693765 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @09:24PM (#26115253)
    Look at actual available jobs [indeed.com]. Not silly popularity contests. Do you honestly believe Delphi is more common than Javascript??

Fear is the greatest salesman. -- Robert Klein

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