Perl 6 makes all of Lisp's mistakes, then sets itself on fire

elfsternberg.com

7 points·labster··3 comments

This post seems to be written by a highly intelligent person, but I fear it comes off as reactionary. They're picking on an example from the slideshow that was posted a few days ago, I believe, and then saying, "This is stupid!"

I would rather have someone take a feature from a very new language, and rather than be reactionary, post about how they felt when they first heard of this feature, ("Weird!", "Wild!" "UH-OH", and then go, "Well, hey, let's see what's it's good for", and try to use the feature. Then, and only then, it would be interesting to read their response of the feature: "I first thought this, but in actuality it saved me a lot of time/came in handy/saved me a ton of lines of code, and hey, it didn't affect anyone else's code!" Or, even, "Yup, just what I expected - yadda yadda - and HERE'S HOW I'D IMPROVE THIS FEATURE SO IT'S MORE OF THE AWESOME"

Then we have something to talk about.

$0.02 and all. Saves a pissing match.

He's a highly intelligent person who has been around the block a few times - I'm not exactly sure how old Elf Sternberg is, but he had already been a net.luminary for some time back when I first discovered usenet. He's not saying "this is stupid" because it's new and different; he's saying "this is stupid" because he's seen this particular decision made before, and he has a pretty good idea where the story is going to go from here.

Because people build bridges and ladders out of rope, Perl has a history of giving the programmers plenty of rope to hang themselves. This is construed as a feature.

The good news is that even if such craziness exists in other people's code, it's lexically scoped, and does not contaminate your own code. I'm just enjoying the fact that even Perl 6's detractors realize how powerful the language is.

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