A Parallel for Perl 6
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-11-09 06:51:16 - Graham EllisPerl 6 is still sufficiently far ahead for me to need to know the general direction in which it's headed, so that its future use can be planned for, but it's too early to be actually trying to do any more with it in the general training arena. I've been pointed (thank you, Caitlinn) to an article by Teodor Zlatanov which talks about a building that's being built but isn't ready for occupation yet and I like the parallel. In his article, 'Ted' describes how you see a lot of activity initially on a building site as foundations are put in place, and then there's a period where little appears to be happening and there's just a lot of rusty steelwork to be seen from the outside. Yet it all comes together, somewhat quickly in the end.
One of the other great beauties of Perl (and Perl 6 too) is that it's designed to be usable at many levels. In other words, for an easy job it's easy to use and you don't need to get into the intricacies, but if you want to, you can get in there. Most jobs are easy, it turns out, so a lot of the RecDescent stuff mentioned in the article is, and will remain, a niche interest for the few while the majority of us get on with good basic coding.