scripting languages - change is inevitable ...

Weblog:		OSCON: Worried about Perl 6
Subject:		scripting languages - change is inevitable ...
Date:		2004-07-27 12:18:24
From:		mmnmm

I think that the jury is still out whether or not Perl 6 will catch on in the same way that earlier versions of Perl were adopted. It is certainly going to be a cleaner and more elegant language implementation but with that always comes the risk over of over-design taking too much time (the risk of being "good" and reasonably fast versus timely). The use of a bytecode virtual machine (parrot) to implement Perl 6 (also Perl 5 along with future versions of Python) is interesting but raises its own issues for real-world applications. Keep in mind that that the current release of Python is also reaching a state of maturity and that Guido van Rossum last year at OSCON suggested that a language update Python 3.0 will be backward incompatible with previous versions - "We're throwing away a lot of the cruft that Python has accumulated." Lack of funding appears to be the main reason holding back a major push for Python 3.0. Sounds a lot like the Perl folks ;-) Then there is always Ruby :-)

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scripting languages - change is inevitable ...
2004-08-01 20:08:48 aristotle [Reply | View]

Note that Perl5 already uses something best described as a VM. Perl5 already has distinct compilation and execution phases. It's just all a lot less explicit, because that machine is part of the innards of Perl and offers no interface other than through the compiler frontend. People therefor do not tend to notice its presence.

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