Perl 6

[prog]

I feel the gentle winds of conventional wisdom buffeting me towards Ruby.

Is there a practical reason why I might want to do this? Coz if I learned it just for S&G but then didn't immediately start using it for serious, I'd forget it.

"Dude, Rails" is not a sufficient reason, unless you can tell me why I'd want to use Rails over any Mason-based solution.

(Referring to Ruby as "Perl 6" is from xach, and the funniest in-joke I've heard all week.)

Comments

[jaq.livejournal.com]

[jaq.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm not sure what it did to my comment.

It was supposed to be a link to this article which attempts to illustrate the difference syntax can make.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, syntax can make a difference. But a lot of syntax is a bad idea for two reasons: it lets programmers do things they probably shouldn't because it's "easy" (for them, not the maintenance coders) and it creates multiple ways of doing the same things, which requires the language-idiom-police to move in and enforce some standards.

GOTO's looked pretty cool once upon a time, and I'm pretty sure that closures (and anonymous inner classes) are not particularly good things to have in production code. Maintainability degrades when there is extreme decoupling between dependent objects and actions. When something blows up in the middle of an anonymous class that was created on the fly somewhere long ago in a constructor far far away the poor guy maintaining the app is in trouble.

So in the best Canadian fashion I am in favour of syntax if necessary, but not necessarily syntax.