| >>I'm wondering if there is anything at all that could. Ok, I've been following Perl 6 for quite a while and learning it these days. So that I could use it for my day to day work after its production release in Christmas. If you liked Perl in the past, and like Ruby. You will absolutely love Perl 6. It has a lot more cleaned up syntax. And the language as such is very Perlish. You will enjoy grammars and macros. And please don't think arrival of JSON and XML has solved and eliminated all text processing problems on earth. If anything arrival of any standard format, only emphasizes the importance of good text processing tools. One size fits all approach doesn't work for common place problems. Sooner or later you will see people shoe horning all kinds of solutions into problem domains they don't belong. The net result looks more like a kludge, than a real solution. This is the whole problem facing people today, because we are forced to use solutions which were not invented to solve the problems they were designed to solve. >>In general we choose a language for their applicability to the problem domain. Perl 6 is a language designed to provide you tools to work with any problem domain, while adopting without breaking backwards compatibility. If this is your concern, then you only have good news to listen. >>As a result it feels much like a solution in search of a problem. iPhone, Unix, C, the original perl itself were all solutions in search of a problem. None of them had prior users or had well marketed audience to begin with. Sometimes people don't know what they want unless they are shown the solution. Tools are not designed based on survey results. Else we wouldn't have cars today, only faster horse carriages. >>I would look at how dominant Java seems to be in the big data community and try knocking it off that perch with appropriate language primitives, constructs and libraries. Java as a benchmark is worst design point you can start with. Only reason why Java is even surviving today is because of its enterprise inertia, and unlimited supply of cheap programmers. At some point in time a massive reset to Java way of doing things is imminent. Language as a whole is old, the original platform-independent goal is now common place in all tools. They can't seem to add anything new or useful without breaking backwards compatibility and the power is falling in the face of newer and powerful languages. |