Skip to main content

Think Perl 6 mega book review

This title comes amid a shower of announcements of forthcoming Perl 6 books, therefore I initially thought  that so many releases at the same time could potentially disorient the aspiring reader. Fortunately it looks more like that each title addresses different kinds of audiences and at I Programmer we aims to find more about what's in it for each audience. 
Think Perl 6 is targeting the uninitiated in programming in general, as such it goes over the pure basics and the raw elements that make up programming as a science.

That said, I don't have the answer as to why someone would be compelled to kick off his exploration of Computer Science with Perl 6 as his first language when there are so many, popular and well tried alternatives such as Python, JavaScript or Java. That person would be someone already versed in some computing, more like a teacher or mentor who finds the idea of tackling Perl 6 rather exciting, and rightly so, as 6 is a post-modern programming language that adopts the latest, state of the art advancements in the world of programming language design.

Another candidate that I can imagine, would be a scientist in a field like Physics or Data Science looking for a tool to make his job easier, or, a high school graduate looking to bootstrap his journey to the world of programming, more likely being recommended Perl 6 by someone more knowledgeable than make that choice by himself.

And, certainly 6 ought to be particularly attractive to Perl 5 hackers eager to see through the hype and discover what Perl's version 6 has in stock for them despite the fact that apart from some similarities  in symbols and syntax, everything else differs. As Larry Wall once said Perl 6 would be:

"Perl 5 done right".

What's been carried over unaltered though is Perl 5's philosophy and innovative thinking.

full review on i-programmer

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Europe Gets Its Own LLM

  EuroLLM is a fully open-sourced large language model made in Europe and built to support all twenty-four official EU languages. While several European states have separately produced their own LLMs, such as Greece's "Meltemi" or the recent offering from Switzerland "Apertus", there was no solution that catered for the languages of all 24 states belonging to the EU block. The time has come for this status to change with the appearance of EuroLLM, a foundational model that supports them all. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/18448-europe-gets-its-own-llm.html

Open Source Is Not Just About Software

  It's about infrastructure as well, something that although not attracting the limelight, is as important as the open source software it hosts. Today the stewards of the largest open source registries in the world have issued an open letter demanding urgent reform in how open source infrastructure is funded, maintained, and operated.  https://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-open-source/18334-open-source-is-not-just-about-software.html

The PaSh Project gives your POSIX script superpowers by utilizing parallelization in order to speed up execution times.

The PaSh Project gives your POSIX script superpowers by utilizing parallelization in order to speed up execution times. This leads to faster results for data scientists,  engineers,  biologists,  economists,  administrators,  and programmers. I remember the time when the saying was "Learn Perl so you don't have to learn the Shell and its hundreds of utilities". Fast forward some decades and the use of shell scripts still has not been eradicated. On the contrary, their use has increased due to the rise of containers, VM's, administering the cloud, and Linux itself. This also serves as a lesson to those who are quick to denounce technologies as 'dead'. There's a time where a new use case revitalizes an old technology. So what is meant by "Unix philosophy"?  full article on i-programmer: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/14990-the-pash-project-advancing-the-unix-philosophy-one-step-further.html