An early description of Perl 6?

waltman on 2003-08-21T01:50:16

I was reading sf writer Ted Chiang's 1991 short story "Understand" today when I came across this uncanny description of perl 6:

I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.