An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 24, 2015 23:40 UTC (Fri) by raiph (guest, #89283)
In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by anselm
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

> [treating 123apples as a number] tends to throw people off at times when instead they expect their compiler or interpreter to complain about a type mismatch.

Fwiw, Perl 6 no longer accepts "baz" as a number, insisting that a string must start with decimal digits if it's to successfully coerce to a number.

There's a saying on #perl6 that every DWIM ("Do What I Mean") has a corresponding WAT. One has to weigh the supposedly positive value of DWIMs against the negative value of their WAT(s).

I hear that, in your opinion, the WAT is not worth the DWIM, especially when it comes time to teach the language.

I'm curious if you can see and thus express any significant value to the DWIM even while it's not enough to counter the WAT?

> I teach Perl classes (among other subjects) for a living and in my considered opinion it is not a simple language to teach.

I'm curious what your student mix is between non-programmers learning programming by learning Perl and programmers in other languages learning Perl.

There are a bunch of programming teachers in the Perl community and I've watched their input help shape Perl 6, which was in part about cleaning up the language and making easy things easier. Perhaps you yourself contributed.

The upshot is that one can get a whole lot done with truly trivial code like:

say lines

> Also, to really appreciate Perl you need to know C, the shell, sed, and awk

Fwiw I don't think that applies to Perl 6.

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 25, 2015 0:15 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm curious what your student mix is between non-programmers learning programming by learning Perl and programmers in other languages learning Perl.

Most of the people I've taught Perl to over the years were programmers with experience in other languages, ranging from Visual BASIC to things like C++ or Java. These people have the advantage that they already know about things like variables, conditionals, and loops. Stuff like $foo[1] vs. @foo[1] tends to confuse them, as does scalar context vs. list context in general. As I said, this stuff has its own twisted logic behind it, but from a language-learner POV it wasn't the smartest idea to design the language that way.

say lines

I'm getting the distinct impression that Perl 6 should not have been called Perl. If it ever actually comes around it will create lots of confusion among our customers because they will have to figure out whether they want us to teach Perl 5 or Perl 6.

In any case, demand for Perl classes hereabouts has dwindled to near-zero anyway. I'm teaching way more Python these days than Perl, and I can't even say I'm sorry. I was a Perl programmer in the late 1980s when we were waiting for the first (pink) Camel book to come out, and have followed the language for a very long time – including, e.g., consulting with O'Reilly on the German translation of the Perl 5 version of Programming Perl – but I don't use Perl for new projects anymore. Not if the code will take more than one screenful of lines, anyway.

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 25, 2015 3:55 UTC (Sat) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]

> $foo[1] vs. @foo[1] tends to confuse them

Yeah. That's gone in Perl 6:

my @foo = 0,1,2,3; say @foo[1];
1

> scalar context vs. list context

Yeah. Context is still very much a thing in Perl 6.

> I'm getting the distinct impression that Perl 6 should not have been called Perl.

Right. I can see it being renamed sometime in the next 5 years, with the leading candidate new name being Camelia. But Larry has refused to even consider that prior to getting a 6.0.0 shipped (which is currently scheduled for this Christmas).

> If it ever actually comes around it will create lots of confusion among our customers because they will have to figure out whether they want us to teach Perl 5 or Perl 6.

I'm sure it's going to put in enough of an appearance globally to at least cause confusion. :)

> In any case, demand for Perl classes hereabouts has dwindled to near-zero anyway.

Where's here?

> I'm teaching way more Python these days than Perl, and I can't even say I'm sorry.

Sure. I like the Perl 5 community, and love Perl 6, but when I've eased newbies into scripting in the last few years I've started with Python, not Perl.

> I don't use Perl for new projects anymore. Not if the code will take more than one screenful of lines, anyway.

I think the same is true of a lot of folk.

The Perl 6 design is clearly aiming at programming-in-the-large just as much as it is scripting. But the only semi-serious test of its characteristics in that regard that I'm aware of is the compiler toolchain. So it seems like the jury is going to still be out for at least another few years on that.