All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

PHP 6 Design versus Perl 6 Design

chromatic on 2007-12-09T21:01:52

I still have not heard any good reason why namespaces in the current implementation are actually useful - or what particular case they solve... so I am wondering, are they really useful? I come now to the conclusion that they are not, and for myself (and most likely my work projects) I would have to decide not to go with namespaces, but instead stick with the 3 letter prefixing. Something that I have totally no problem with, as it is nice and easy.

— Derick Rethans, RFC: Dropping Namespace

Occasionally something reinforces my belief that choosing Good (Cheap having been chosen for us) over Fast is still the right decision for Perl 6.

Seriously?

ondigio on 2007-12-09T23:48:19

Thank the almighty for you magnificent beings working to deliver us unto the Perl 6. Seven years-ish ago I abandoned PHP upon discovering the beauty of Perl. I've never looked back, and this sort of nonsense just reinforces my decision. If I could lay a big wet one on you, chromatic, and Larry Wall himself, I would not hesitate to do so.

Re:Seriously?

chromatic on 2007-12-10T07:10:57

Remember, the quote is from just one person on the PHP list, and I certainly don't mean to imply that all PHP developers share that notion. However, it's a scary idea.

I appreciate the support, but in lieu of a sloppy wet kiss, can I ask you to download any or all of Perl 5.10 RC3, Parrot monthly releases, or kp6 releases, run the tests, and report the results to the appropriate venues? That would instantly elevate you to a magnificent being in my book.

Re:Seriously?

stu42j on 2007-12-11T04:45:11

Say, what would be the appropriate venue? I download/compiled/tested Perl 5.10 recently (mostly wanted to play with smart match). All tests passed. Is that a report that would be useful to someone, somewhere or do you only need failures?

Re:Seriously?

chromatic on 2007-12-11T08:37:51

Successes on platforms more exotic than x86 GNU/Linux or x86 FreeBSD are nice to have. Failures are always not nice to have but good to hear about. The appropriate venue is an e-mail to perl5-porters@perl.org.

Tough times for PHP

perrin on 2007-12-10T04:59:28

There are some difficult things going on in the PHP world right now. One of them is the drive to finally support Unicode. As the Perl community learned, it's not easy, and you can expect it to cause trouble for a while before it settles down. And some people are actively resisting it because of the performance hit it will mean.

Then there's the ongoing battle to get people to use PHP5 and kill of PHP4 support. The huge amount of ISP support and off-the-shelf applications is a double-edged sword now, since that means more ISPs and applications to get switched over to PHP5.

The OO stuff in PHP5 is really nice, and I hope they do manage to get people to switch to it. I sympathize when I see what people who still run on perl 5.005 have to deal with.

Re:Tough times for PHP

chromatic on 2007-12-10T07:14:32

I'm also hugely sympathetic to the desire to rid the world of PHP 4. It's an improvement over PHP 3, but that's a low bar.

I still hold out hope that someday PHP will receive a Perl 6-style makeover, but sadly PHP 3-style code will probably last as long as COBOL.