From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-03-05T20:00:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Boy I love the Ruby community

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 06:25:03PM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> >Yes, you could probably write a production application in Perl 6 right
> >now, but Perl 6 is a moving target right now.  If you're planning to put
> >Perl 6 code in production now, you'd better bundle it with an
> >interpreter and be ready to support the interpreter yourself.  You'd be
> >better off, if you want to play with Perl 6 at this point, to do just
> >that for now -- play with it.  Learn it to the best of your ability,
> >write toy scripts and even automate non-critical tasks, and submit bug
> >reports when things don't work as expected.  Right now, using Perl 6 is
> >more a hobby and a way to help the further development of Perl 6 than a
> >means of getting Real Work done.  At least, that's my understanding.
> >  
> Well then ... as a "hobby", what advantage does learning Perl 6 have 
> over, say, Erlang or Haskell, both of which have significant if not 
> "killer" apps? One would be choosing between getting in on the "ground 
> floor" of what, as opposed to climbing on a rolling bandwagon that 
> appears to be gaining momentum?

Hey, if you don't like things with the name Perl on them, or only learn
languages when they have a significant post-release momentum to them,
that's fine.  Choose accordingly.  If, on the other hand, you find that
you like what you've read or heard about Perl 6, then maybe you'd find
it interesting to learn.  The above reads like you're trying to put me
on the defensive, but really, I don't have anything to defend.


> 
> I guess I'm looking for a "killer language feature" in Perl 6. I don't 
> know enough about Haskell to know if it has any killer features, but I 
> know of at least two in Erlang -- concurrency done with lightweight 
> processes and some pretty good compile-time code checking tools. Now 
> Ruby, of course, could very easily learn lightweight processes, but 
> nobody seems to think it's possible to do compile-time code checking, 
> and quite a few Rubyists don't even think such tools have any value.

Try this for a "killer feature":
It's kinda like Perl 5, but better.  (At least, that's the theory.)

If you hate Perl, maybe that means it's not for you.

On the other hand . . . Perl 6 is doing some interesting things with
list handling and inheritance -- like, it's not actually using
"inheritance", per se.  It's using trait composition instead to achieve
similar effects.  I've never used a trait composition system like this
before, and the idea interests me.  It looks like it may, implemented
well, be a significant improvement for more dynamic programming idioms
over more traditional inheritance.

Hey, it's a new language.  I have a better question than to ask why I
should learn it.  How about "Why not?"

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Leon Festinger: "A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell
him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he
questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."