[PRL] Perl 6

[Matthias Felleisen]

The speaker said one thing that hit home:

  "If I had had such great features for 40 years (macros),
   and if nobody had used my language, I would be embarrassed."

We have to be embarrassed in a sense, and I said so during my warm-up
talk on Wed for the ACM. I went there to figure out how we can not just
do the right thing but also get the right thing to people.

Unfortunately all I learned is how to cross a power drill with a kitchen
sink to obtain Perl 6. Oh, and I forgot the chainsaw in the mix. So I 
left
after an hour. (As some student in 211 just told me, I took the fun with
me :-)

-- Matthias


On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 09:31 AM, Joe Marshall wrote:

> Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> writes:
>
>> Tonight Damian Conway (Monash U, Aus) spoke on Perl 6 in Dodge.
>> I still consider Perl >= 5 to be  a language that's far more
>> "innovative" (*)
>> than anything with Java or J in it. It's kind of sad that only four PL
>> people
>> showed up. -- Matthias
>>
>> (*) Perl is probably the first language in widespread use with 
>> closures,
>> functions, object systems, pattern matching, etcetc. It's interesting
>> to see
>> how they reach wide audience and how they are catching up with things
>> that our side of the world have been studying. I give it a couple of
>> more
>> iterations and they'll see the value of () :-)
>
> Perl makes me physically ill, I didn't want to disrupt the proceedings.
>
> Was your interest in this masochism, schadenfeude, or just slumming?