An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 16, 2015 16:02 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by epa
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

> Any programming language is unambiguous, and that includes Perl.

Quote from this nice and short interview of an incredibly smart person:

> Arguably in Perl 1 through to 5 we didn’t manage it quite adequately enough. Sometimes the computer was confused when it really shouldn’t be. With Perl 6, we discovered some ways to make the computer more sure about what the user is talking about, even if the user is confused about whether something is really a string or a number.

"...discovered some ways to make more sure even if the user is confused"?! Bye Perl!

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 16, 2015 17:52 UTC (Thu) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]

Larry wasn't talking about how confusing Perl is or isn't.

What Larry was talking about was the concepts that A) sometimes coders are confused (this is true in any language) and B) it's a good thing to provide better error messages (this is also true in any language) and that Perl 6 is better able to provide better error messages when a coder is confused.

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 17, 2015 9:04 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I understood that to be referring to dynamic typing where the same value can be interpreted as either a string or a number. That is the way Perl works - polymorphic values but monomorphic operators (so that there are separate operators for string equality and numeric equality). But Larry's remark is purposely quite vague so it could be referring to several things.

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 18, 2015 19:15 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> "...discovered some ways to make more sure even if the user is confused"?! Bye Perl!

I believe this is referring to design decisions like $a + $b producing either a number or helpful type mismatch error message, whereas in the language holding the front of the web together, addition is a non-commutative operator and also "grapefruit" is a legal return value.

Maybe with a little education you'll be offended at the right languages?