From: Martin DeMello Date: 2008-08-05T15:52:01+09:00 Subject: Re: State of the Onion On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:43 PM, Michael T. Richter wrote: > On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 15:17 +0900, Martin DeMello wrote: > >> I don't understand this hostility to perl6, which (discounting its >> current lack of completion) looks like a very exciting language. > > Discounting the thing that engenders the most hostility, you're still left > with claims like "the first language to do " despite the list of almost > antique languages that do for pretty much any value of that is > claimed. It's kind of like the hostility UNIX addicts generated when the > clueless claimed a series of firsts for it that were ... well, not first. > Like hierarchical file systems, which some have seriously tried to claim > were introduced by UNIX. Or devices in the file name space. Admitted, but it's more a fault of the language proponents than of the language itself. I don't really have a dog in this fight; it just saddens me to see Perl6 being dismissed for social rather than technical reasons. >> Sure, >> lisp lets you have arbitrary reader macros, but it looks like perl6 >> will make syntactic extension a lot more accessible than any of the >> lisp dialects I've seen. > > How much more accessible than, say, a Scheme hygienic macro do you want? > Seriously, writing macros in the Lisps is trivial. (Writing them in Dylan > was a bit of a pain in the ass because of the impedance mismatch between the > Lisp-like macro architecture and the Algol-like language syntax, but even > there it was still accessible.) Are you using a different definition for > "accessible" than I am here? Yes - I'm talking about a macro system, grammar engine or whatever that helps you get over the impedance mismatch between the language's base syntax and your embedded dsl's syntax. Writing macros in lisp is trivial as long as your macros have a superficial syntactic resemblance to lisp code. It looks like Perl 6 will go beyond that. martin