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Comment Re:The problem with breaking backward compatibilit (Score 5, Interesting) 106

I think you ought to test/validate your assumptions and consider evaluating what Perl 6 has to offer. Many of the core Perl 6 developers had little experience or interest in Perl 5. The pace of development and number of committers seems to be accelerating.

Performance has gotten about 4 times faster in the last year.

The developer ecosystem is maturing. CPAN6 is here.

Perl 6 provides Inline::Perl5. Which allows backward compatible access to and mixing of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It also allows you to specify a versioned dialect of Perl 6. So in ~10 years when Perl 6.i is released. Your code targeting Perl 6.d functionality which has been deprecated in 6.e and removed in 6.f will still work.

The design and implementation of Perl 6 is clean and heavily influenced by Paul Graham's essay on The Hundred-Year Language. Most of Perl 6 is written in both Perl 6 and a subset of Perl 6 called Not Quite Perl (NQP). Which means Perl developers don't need to learn another language to become core developers.

Larry said that acceleration beats velocity. Perl 6 certainly seems to be accelerating. If you watch the video... there's a lot of exciting things baked into Perl 6. However the focus is on getting things right, clean, and fast (in that order). If/when performance gets within ~10-20% of Perl 5, Python, etc... I think the expressiveness and strangely consistent and clean language design will prompt many to re-evaluate their concept of Perl.

Perl

Perl 6, Early, With Rakudo Star 220

Perl 6 may have been "finally coming within reach" in 2004, but now it's even closer. Reader rnddim writes "The Perl 6 implementation Rakudo Star has been released today for 'early adopters.' This release of Rakudo is different from the normal monthly compiler releases in that it is bundled with a draft of a Perl 6 book, and several modules. It's not complete, and it's not as fast as it should be, but Rakudo in its current state is proving to be usable and useful. Rakudo Star releases will come monthly or as major features or bugfixes are made. It is available for download at github.com."

Comment $200 laptop == how many textbooks? (Score 1) 168

I've heard this complaint before. Have you ever considered that the OLPC XO laptop at $200 can hold significantly more than $200 worth of books?

The XO has a built in webcam and microphone. I remember learning how cell phones in remote fishing villages in Peru allowed fisherman to check market prices before selling to the middle men. Imagine doing that while putting the Internet at their fingertips?

The XO is an enabling technology. It won't solve the problems of poor children around the world. But it will enable them to solve their own problems. And I dare say that have a much better idea of the problems and solutions than we do.

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