Better Perl

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

Hi there,

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Nigel Rantor <wiggly at wiggly.org> wrote:
>
>  Meh, the perl rant has gone off into troll territory about IDE's now.
>
>  Someone did link to a couple of Perlmonks articles, particularly:
>
>  http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=676072

That was me.

>
>  I'm not so sure this question really appeals to me. More exciting I can do
> without, I want a *better* Perl, how about some of the following?
>

My thinking was following: We need other people to use Perl (positive
externality and all that) - and it looks that Perl does not attract
any new developers (nor any new startups).  To counter that trend we
need some new excitement in Perl.

Not that I would not like to see improvement in the language :)

>  - sane threading model
>
>  - simplify syntax in future versions (fewer sigils, cleaner type system)
>
>  - go multiparadigm with better OO model and add some functional stuff if
> that suits you.
>
>  - steal from Ruby/Lisp/C++ with compile/run-time metaprogramming tools
>

Some of that you'll get with Moose.

But after the long discussion at Perlmonks I think I would reformulate
my point as: we should start to 'care about the masses'.  I mean -
look at PHP - it took an awful lot of time until the Perl world
realised that easy deployment is the cornerstone of mass adoption, and
that it because for the Perl developers, working in established
businesses, easy deployment did not matter much, nobody cared about it
- and it was never done.

>  I am not someone who wants to hack on Perl's guts, I'm more likely to use
> something else until I find it isn't good enough (I may eventually hit this
> with Ruby, but for personal projects it seems fine so far), and if I need
> speed it comes down to C/C++ anyway.
>
>  Basically, how about we get more people using Perl by making the language
> better instead of the fragmented tar pit Perl6 looks like from the outside?
>
>   n
>



-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/