Least Favorite Features
brian d foy (author of numerous perl books) asked this question on Stack Overflow: “What are five things you hate about your favorite language?”
I figured that since I am trying to bring perl 6 to fruition (note: I’ve only written tests, so I am not very good at helping so far) I would pick perl 6 as my favorite programming language. Here was my answer:
Posted Mon, Feb 23, 2009I’m going out on a limb since I can’t really use it full time, but I’ll try anyway!
Perl 6
- func(“frew”) != func (“frew”)
- It annoys me, but there is good reason for it. In perl 5 print (5 + 6) * 10 still gets me every now and then)
- It may be easier to parse than perl 5 in a lot of places, but it still kills my editor sometimes
- It still has a lot of the line noise perl 5 which scares a lot of people. That means it’s harder to get them excited etc.
- There are no libraries yet.
- This will be a non issue if perl 6 does indeed end up supporting perl 5, but that may be a burden not worth bearing.
- There’s no REPL, or what rubyists would call irb.
- A solid interactive perl 6 with tab completion, color coding, etc, would make using and learning it so much nicer.
- Currently the documentation is basically the English spec. Not exactly an easy read.
- I know it’s a stupid cliche, but it’s not out yet!
- I am allowed to complain because I am helping :-P
The first three are the language; the rest aren’t really the language itself but the fact that it’s not out yet.
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