Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingkongrevenge | Hacker News Reader

A restaurant review has more content than this. This is just a list of personal tastes, with virtually no addressable argument. A lot of what he does say is idiotic. His entire lisp section, for example, is about an elisp system, which has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of learning real lisp. "Perl OO never really caught on." Um, have you looked at CPAN or the core module APIs in the last 8 years?

View on HN

Perl OO never really caught on because it isn't part of the core language. It's the same with Scheme. It's nothing to be embarrassed about or something that you want to try and correct.

Also, what pray tell is a "real" lisp? Last I checked, Emacs-Lisp has macros and much of what makes any lisp a "real" lisp.

> Perl OO never really caught on because it isn't part of the core language.

What?

Perl OO did catch on, and it is part of the core language.

Perl OO = library. Scheme OO = library. Library != language. The last time I tried to use Perl OO, CPAN had to download a bunch of stuff for Moose. That doesn't sound like it's part of the core language to me.

Has the situation changed? Are there OO things included with the default dist of Perl?

Actually in lisp (and scheme as scheme is a dialect of lisp), the line between library and language is so fuzzy that its practically invisible.

Perl 5 has had OO forever. Here's how it works:

  package Class;
  sub new { my $class = shift; bless {} => $class }
  sub method { my $self = shift; $self->{attribute} = 'value' };

  package Subclass;
  our @ISA = qw(Class);
  sub method { my $self = shift; $self->SUPER::method(...); ... }

   package main;
   my $class = Subclass->new;
   $class->method;

This is built into the core.

Keep in mind that the article is like 4 years old.

So we should be impressed that it can spell? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com