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Can you give an example of a language that is similarly precise with less verbosity, while still being comprehensible? Perl 6 is alarmingly concise in a lot of cases (hyper-operators come to mind), so it's super weird to see it called verbose. I'd wager that the ideal, or at least shortest, Perl 6 solution to most problems is shorter than most other languages...I don't know if it's necessarily more readable (you have to know a lot of the language to read really concise Perl 6 code, and there are many new concepts for most developers), but it's definitely not verbose. Int:D, Int:U, etc. provide information about types. They aren't arbitrary extra boilerplate. Every language with types specifies them in somewhat comparable ways. Perl 6 has gradual typing, you can use as much or as little of it as you want, and as suits your problem domain. You don't need those types, but if you use them well, you can do things more concisely...e.g. for multi-method dispatch based on type of arguments. given/when are keywords. Every language has keywords, and sometimes they'll be new ones that you haven't seen in other languages. Sigils, again, provide additional information, both to the reader and the compiler. Perl 6 is probably an improvement, or at least simplification, over Perl 5 in that the sigil is constant and doesn't reflect the usage. e.g. in Perl 5, when you want a single element of an array, you use $name[1], but when you want the whole array you use @name. The idea (sort of) being that $ is singular (a "scalar" value), while @ is plural. Some people don't like sigils, but I don't see any point in re-litigating it 30 years on. Perl has sigils. That's just how it do. Some like it, some don't. Enough Perl developers like it that it's never gone away. |
This assumes I think Perl (6) is precise and comprehensible.