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Archive for June, 2011

Perl 6

Posted in Perl on June 27, 2011| 3 Comments »

The latest from chromatic (emphasis mine):

"If you think people don’t like Perl because the Perl 6 project started almost ten years ago, you haven’t been paying attention.

(Think Python has better marketing? Guido announced Python 3000 before Larry announced Perl 6, and it still took the better part of eight years for the Python developers to produce Python 3, and people are still upset that Python 3 is a wholesale replacement for Python 2, and there’s still a debate over when – and in some cases, if – major projects using Python will embrace Python 3 and abandon Python 2. Think about that.)"

Okay, I didn’t see any regret for shafting Perl 5 for the last 10 years, but great! I’m so happy that the opposition made the same stupid mistake that we did. </sarcasm>

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Easy Unicode in Perl

Posted in Perl, tagged , on June 14, 2011| 2 Comments »

Lots of discussion on Unicode in Perl recently.

(I didn’t see any retraction from Nelson, respectful or otherwise, though)

I can’t see what is wrong with the (brand newish) utf8 pragma approach especially when all the issues are ironed out. You don’t want to break backwards compatibility and give folks any more reason not to upgrade to later versions of Perl.

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Does Perl need a JIT?

Posted in Perl on June 6, 2011| 4 Comments »

Casey Randberger dropped by to point out that Squeak Smalltalk now has a JIT.

I don’t care about Squeak1, but very occasionally I think it would be nice if Perl got a JIT.

However, I don’t think it would make sense to develop a JIT for Perl.

  • People don’t choose Perl for its speed
  • The reason folks switch from Perl to a competitor2 is not because the competitor is faster (because it isn’t)
  • Even for Python, everyone uses CPython rather than speedy implementation

There’s a lot of reasons I choose Perl, but a JIT would not increase the number of projects where I reach for Perl over C++.

1. It’s not pragmatic enough for me – who would employ me to write Squeak for example

2. Python and Ruby

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