Jeremy Hylton wrote:
"PP" == Paul Prescod <paulp@ActiveState.com> writes:
PP> My sense was "Second System Syndrome" but Damian Conway is PP> confident that they don't have that problem.
Isn't that one of the signs of the second system effect? <0.5 wink>
Did he offer any reason for his confidence?
Nothing directly to that question (we ran out of time). But overall of the Perl guys said things like: a) we're got a bunch smart people working on it (Larry, Damian, Dan, etc.) b) everything we're doing has been done somewhere before so it isn't research (e.g. generators, proper exception handling, decent OO syntax, etc.) c) Perl 5 is a pretty complex system and people of similar caliber built that so why should Perl 6 be any different d) Perl 6's implementation will be so much cleaner than Perl 5's that integration of parts will be a lot easier. e) we've set up all of these working groups to parallelize development and that will help alot too. http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/09/perl6mail.html I think that they are way too optimistic, but there were a few things I learned that at least hinted in directions of sanity: Perl 5 support may be provided through some sort of dual interpreter model rather than trying to write a single interpreter that supports both. Dual interpreters are pretty well understood (pyperl, jpe, Perl.NET etc.) So "full backwards compatibility" may be possible using that trick. And Damian is trying to talk Larry out of a strict requirement that the Perl compiler be written in Perl. Also, as David just said, you have to remember that Python people have a much higher bar of coherence to jump over than the Perl guys. If they put a bunch of random stuff in the language in a way that didn't really feel right together -- then it would be just like Perl 5 only with more features. Whereas we spend a week debating how the 'yield' keyword should interact with the 'def' keyword. Damian also said that Perl 6 has to be faster than Perl 5 or nobody will use it. Neil Bauman asked him why Perl wasn't being written in Perl (Neil's opinion is that Perl is literally the greatest language ever created). Damian responded with a great quote: "Performance. If Performance wasn't an issue, I'd probably write Perl 6 in Python or something like it with wonderfully beautiful OO abstractions and it would run like a dog." -- Take a recipe. Leave a recipe. Python Cookbook! http://www.ActiveState.com/pythoncookbook