Perl 6 to Break Compatibility, Support Other Interpreters
Linked by David Adams on Sun 7th Dec 2008 02:03 UTC, submitted by HugoS
General Development Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility [but] in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax â€" and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."
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egarland
Member since:
2005-08-05

"But they/you have been at it for 8 years, I was still a minor when people started talking about perl 6..."

How long is a complete language redesign and rewrite supposed to take? Python just did some syntax updates and minor tweaks for 3.0 and it took them 8 years. Parrot is a completely new VM with capabilities no VM has had before. Perl 6 is a ground up redesign of the language. They designed for 6 years before starting coding and now have been coding for 2 years with regular progress and working builds that you can download and use *right now*. They have a plan, a schedule on that plan and they've been making their milestones on that schedule. This is the antithesis of vaporware.

There are legitimate criticisms of Perl 6, none of yours are among them.

Reply Parent Score: 2

petdance Member since:
2008-12-07

Thanks for pointing out the absurdity of the complaints of "It's taking too long." I'd like to see anyone else break down and estimate the project.

Reply Parent Score: 1

pantheraleo Member since:
2007-03-07

This is a perfectly legitimate criticism No software project can afford to take 8 years to develop. The technology moves along to quickly. If you are working that slowly that it's taking 8 years and you still don't even have a usable beta, you are so far behind the technology curve that any work you did at the beginning is now obsolete and has to be redone because newer and better ideas about how to handle a VM have come along and such.

You simply can't afford to take this long to develop software. And we see the consequences. Parrot is virtually irrelevant now for anything except Perl. It simply took them too long to get anything usable put together.

And as I said, Perl 6 has no usable beta even in site yet.

Software project simply can't take this long and not even have a usable beta. It is a perfectly valid criticism to say this project needs to move faster and have better planning.

Reply Parent Score: 1