Larry Wall Presents: Perl 6 | Hacker News Reader

Larry Wall Presents: Perl 6

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51 pointsjustinator8 comments

Maybe I'll get down voted but I really think perl 4.036 was the best perl. It was already weird with all the $this and @that but it was such a pleasant language that when I was at Sun I proposed rewriting a pile of /usr/bin in perl. We had already made stuff slow as crap with unicode support so why not? Didn't happen, Sun pulled the unicode support to get back C level perf.

Call me crazy, I love me some perl 4. That release was brilliant.

It's quite possible that Larry agrees with you.

I've never heard him suggest that it was a mistake to build on Perl 4 to get to Perl 5. Which implies that he considered it worth A) continuing to evolve Perl and B) building directly on the language design and implementation of Perl 4. But aiui, when the mug smashed in 2000, he quite literally instantly seized on the notion of more or less starting over in regard to language design, compiler implementation (and, very importantly, the cultural vibe), for Perl 6.

Perl4 was my first Perl. I was a hard-core C programmer at the time, and Perl4 was just seriously fun.

By the way, I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5. So, feel free to roll with Perl4!

> I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5.

I think most programs that will run on the latest Perl 5 will run on the latest Perl 6.[1]

So, yeah, feel free to roll with Perl4 and maybe mix it up with a little Perl 6 magic (eg concurrency or Unicode grapheme string handling).

[1] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/

I don't suppose this will be live-streamed?

I hope not.

Why? Not everyone interested in this can make it to the event.

Because I think folk will be inclined to refer to and even hype this Craig's List hosted "event" as something akin to a launch of Perl 6 1.0.

Some will be well-meaning.

Some will be malicious.

But it won't matter. Perl 6 and Larry won't be even close to ready by October 5th (imo) for the expectations and exposure that would inevitably follow.

Imo we get just one more shot at fairly easily getting a significant chunk of the tech world to voluntarily strongly focus on Perl 6 for 15 minutes. We can and hopefully will maintain control of when that happens even if we can't control anything else.

It's going to be damn hard (but just about doable, one hopes) to make Perl 6 good enough -- as a flawed but at least interesting 1.0 -- to withstand and ultimately profit from the spike in scrutiny following a launch this christmas. If we launch (in the public's eye) now, I predict we'll get widely dismissed and will have already blown most of the unique and precious opportunity currently still available if we instead make sure that the launch, and perception of a launch, waits until christmas.

So, I do hope they record this Craig's List presentation for historical purposes but keep it for private viewing only until after christmas. (Or maybe put out a very short video of some highlights, making it clear it's not yet the launch. And maybe, just maybe, spend a couple weeks or so producing something reasonably slick, blending highlights with some other material, to try attract more contributors in the run up to christmas.)

Imo, Christmas really needs to wait until Christmas and I pray that it does.

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