JAP(5|6)H
Surely you, dear reader, already know what this post is about. But on the off-chance that you don’t, make sure you read these posts from people smarter, more connected, and more balanced than I.
You may remember the beginnings of the technical posts on this blog. They were mostly sub-par because I had not begun read my articles before posting. I also had the bad habit of posting more than once a day. A lot of those posts were about perl6 and those posts were what got me more involved in blogging. I now have high hopes that I can use perl6 at work one day because of that time for me. perl6 has so many cool features that perl5 just didn’t seem to have and will certainly never have in the core…
But then something happened. I convinced my boss to open the IRC port at work so I could get help with DBIx::Class. While I was in #dbix-class I got a lot more connected with the community. It was there that I learned of the IronMan competition (how people ever found this blog before that I’ll never know.) And from that channel (and also the IronMan feed) I learned about all these amazing technologies that perl5 has.
Moose, Devel::Declare, and Catalyst just to name a few. I remember asking a question in #dbix-class and mst responding with something like,
method baz ($foo) { return $self->bar($foo); }
I thought he was programming perl6! Devel::Declare brings some of that nice perl6 syntax to perl quite nicely, and the above is Devel::Declare (with MooseX::Declare or Method::Signatures::Simple probably) in action. Of course few people would say the above is perl6 specific, it’s really like most languages nowadays.
The point that I’m trying to get across here is that I learned a lot when I played with perl6. Certainly not as much as I learned when I flirted with ruby (for probably two years straight,) but I was much less experienced then. I love the fact that part of the perl mindset is stealing from other languages. And I love that we are stealing from perl6. Maybe one day I can say, “I love that we are stealing from perl5,” but perl6 (or really rakudo) just isn’t there yet, and in the meantime I have a job to do and cool projects to work on, and I’m glad that there is a push for us to discuss more technical merits of perl5 and perl6 and deal with less of the drama and politics. I am all in favor of doing more of what a programmer should be good at (technology) and less of what we are all good at (trash talking, etc.)
perl6 and perl6, two languages, same family, different lineages.
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