23 Years of Culture Hacking With Perl 99
Modern Perl writes "Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, reflects on Perl's history of hacking its culture, from subverting the reductionist culture of Unix to reinventing the ideas of programming language and culture in Perl 6 and the verbal aikido used to encourage honest detractors to become valuable contributors. Perl turned 23 years old last week, and Perl 6 is available."
Re:Yeah, now try hiring for it. (Score:4, Informative)
If you're looking for Perl 6 coders, you might try their IRC channel, #perl6 on Freenode [perl6.org].
Re:Yeah, now try hiring for it. (Score:3, Informative)
I've been a build engineer since the mid-80's. My first exposure to Perl was in 1989. The last line of Perl I wrote was in 2005. I spent a year deciding on which direction to go... Python or Ruby. I went with Ruby as my primary scripting language, and have brought Ruby and Rails into 5 companies to build engineering infrastructure. The reason I went with Ruby was due to its simplicity, power, DSL support, and Rails, and both the Ruby and Rails community. In Silicon Valley I found that when working with people that are coding in Java, they are in most cases going to script with a well accepted OO language like Python or Ruby. For me, both Ruby, Rails and their communities has had a huge influence on my coding and development practices.
Scary (Score:4, Informative)
So I looked at the Perl5To6 Manual, and it gave me a headache. Really, I had to get some medicine just now. There used to be 10 ways to do anything in Perl 5, and in Perl 6 there's 20. And operators are approaching APL in obscureness and number. It has ways of being even more terse at the expense of the maintainer's head possibly exploding. Some changes are very nice and clean up some weirdness, but they compensated for it with a vengeance.
There's macros, and more contexts (where function returns different things depending on how its value is getting used), and meta-operators, and operator overloading on never-before-seen scale, and weird variant types, and ways to embed an enum into any object, even more complicated regular expressions, and so on ...