"10 Perl 6 Myths"

Speaker: Juerd
Duration: 7 minutes
Level: None :)

Het Nederlandse origineel is hier.

1. Perl 6 is an April fools joke

No, that is Parrot.

2. String concat will be underscore

No, it will be tilde.

3. Perl 6 is backwards compatible

No. Parrot can handle Perl 5, but Perl 6 itself is a new language. There will perhaps be a conversion script.

4. Everything is an object

No, you can use anything with OO syntax if you want to, but that doesn't make everything an object.

5. Perl 5 is good enough

Perl 5 has slow subs, unreadable internals, and no formal specification. Threading in Perl 5 is a problem.

6. Perl 6 development is closed and secret

Almost everything happens in public mailing lists. You can join today and hack away at Parrot and Pugs and the beginning of the grammar (PGE)

7. Perl 6 is harder than Perl 5

There is more to learn, but it will not get harder. Consistency (less exceptions!) and new ground breaking features make things easier.

8. Perl 6 is slower

Whoever says this, is lying or paranormally gifted...

The current minimal implementation of Perl 6, that is written in Haskell, is indeed slow, but it is not the final version. The final version will be written in Perl 6.

9. CPAN-modules lose their value

Through PONIE, many Perl 5 modules will be usable in Parrot, and many popular modules will probably be rewritten.

And of course we get modules for free from languages that switch to Parrot.

10. It'll take years until we have Perl 6

Well, err...