introspection (and Perl 6)

Chris Benson chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk
Wed Jan 23 21:49:32 GMT 2008


On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 08:54:05PM +0000, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> Andy Armstrong wrote:
> >Did you know you needed Perl 5 before you'd used it?
> 
> Many more people could see the point before perl 5 arrived. There were 
> several features that were new to perl, immediately comprehensible and 
> widely applicable. I respectfully submit that this is not the case with 
> perl6.

I remember back in the day, a certain tomc telling all and sundry that:
- a 'scripting language' didn't need OO constructs, 
- if concatenated hash^Wassociative-array keys were good enough for Aho,
Weinberger & Kernighan, then they were good enough for Perl, and who
needed multi-dimensional data structures anyway,
- and so on.
and he wasn't alone (though he was probably the most vocal :-)

I also remember feeling some sympathy.

But now, there's no way I would want to write a program longer than a
few lines in Perl4.

So I'm keeping quiet on P6 until I get/read/understand/write some code,
in the hope that it will rejuvenate my brain and increase my range like
P5 did.
-- 
Chris Benson


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