ThePanda

Larry Wall was here for a CS DUG thing earlier today. Most of his talk was focused on Perl 6, what makes it different from Perl 5, and to a lesser extent, why Perl looks anything like it does. Now, as a minor warning, before I anger anyone with something stupid, I don’t really use Perl, and while I can write really really basic perl scripts, and parse scripts already written, especially with the help of the tubes, I don’t understand that much about it. In a line, Perl 6 looked exciting, especially with all that was done with closures, how close it looked to haskell, lazy lists, and other such fun things, and while I really want to try and learn it once it makes it to a semi-stable release, or perhaps earlier, maybe over the summer, I still find a whole lot of Perl code ambiguous. Or to put this more simply, much like my, now very much reduced, dislike for Python, my dislike for Perl originates from not knowing how to code well using Perl. I don’t really understand regex to any great degree, I can read man pages, experiment, and produce fairly usable regex, but I never got around to learning it (perhaps I should have, but as things go, this never made it to the top of my priority queue). That being said, there’s a fair number of strange things which have been bugging me about Python (tail-recursion, the memory model, strange things which go bump at night), and the talk today seemed to state that this a lot of these things seem to have been done right for Perl 6, so at some point in time, I will probably end up trying to learn this, and then not use it forever, and then not be sure about it when I next need to use it.

C sucks at parameterizing types in a library. It makes me unhappy.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 3:02 am and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.