reesesWeb

Some of you may not be aware of this, but I'm a pretentious a-hole, especially about building software.

No, really. If you don't believe me, just take it in arguendo for this post.

Having worked in the software and intarw3b areas for the past however long, I've dragged behind me a bit of troll line, snagging a few friends who also have some contact with the industry. As happens, these are often other technical folk. As very often happens in the technical community, many of them are perl programmers, much as I might try to dissuade them from speaking to me. As you may know, Perl is a distasteful, ugly scripting language that shouldn't be use for any real programs. It should only be used to glue real programs together, and never reviewed or maintained, because it's impossible to read.

So, imagine my growing surprise over the past many months, as I read the apocalypses and exigeses coming from lwall and Damian Conway. This Perl 6 thing is shaping up to address almost everything I've complained about contemporary mainstream programming environments.

If I had an option of environments to use while building software for money, I'd probably pick some mixture of lisp and Smalltalk, with perhaps a Haskell or even Oz thrown into the mix. I'd have objects, and generic containers, and real macros, and closures, and late binding, and multiple (at least double) dispatch, and currying. So, shiver me timbers when I read this very line from exegesis 6:

This Exegesis explores the new subroutine semantics described in Apocalypse 6. Those new semantics greatly increase the power and flexibility of subroutine definitions, providing required and optional formal parameters, named and positional arguments, a new and extended operator overloading syntax, a far more sophisticated type system, multiple dispatch, compile-time macros, currying, and subroutine wrappers.

My eager anticipation for Perl 6 grows on a daily basis. It's taking a language I have never bothered to learn well (see the example below), because of aesthetic disdain, and turning it into the only programming environment I would ever need. It has almost every programming feature that was invented in the 70s and early 80s, the ones ignored by the rest of the commodity languages community, slammed into one gorgeous compiler/interpreter. Previously, I had looked forward only to Parrot, so I could make use of the cornucopia of Perl modules from civilised scripting environments, like Ruby, or Scheme-on-Parrot. But the language, as described so far, has made Parrot largely irrelevent.

I swear, if Apocalypse/Exegesis 7 talk about concurrent programming and Horn clauses, I'm going to crap my pants.

It's obvious that, after Perl 6 appears on the scene (or at least, Perl 6.1) there will be absolutely no reason to use any other programming environment. Everyone will migrate to Perl, or other languages will start borrowing from Perl, just as they currently do from Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, or whatever your paradigm fancies.

Or will we?

In looking at some of the developments on the horizon, such as the maturation of C#, the growing importance of Oz and Haskell, the growing utility of mainstream IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, or even Visual BASIC, there are so many bloody reasons to be optimistic about the future of programming, to think that we're on the cusp of the golden age of programming. Good God, I can't wait.

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