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Comment Re:Well, that makes things better (Score 2) 129

power user features can exist even in user-friendly environments

Sure they can "exist" but that does not keep the "user-friendliness" from getting underfoot.

Imagine for a moment that one day you get home, and not only has someone removed all your CD shelves so that safety banisters could be installed on every wall, they have also also baby-proofed your entire apartment so nothing is where you left it, put each of your power tools in its own locked box each with a different key. made all the lights in the place turn on at once when you clap, turned parental controls on your TV on, and entered a one-year contract with a company of tiny elves who will come and rearrange all your furniture every week in new and unusual ways, throw all the food from you fridge out and fill it with bags of pesto, and store the contents of all your wastebaskets in your garage.

That's the level of difference we are talking here.

Comment Re:What did I miss? (Score 2) 212

Spitballing here, but the level of neutrons that get blocked by shielding is proportional to the amount of shielding, and the level of neutrons that tunnel out is some sigma of the density of the number of neutrons still travelling in the correct direction to hit the sensor, while the level of neutrons that tunnel back is not related to the amount of shielding at all, so measurements at different levels of shielding should create a solvable system of equations. Assuming there is no shielding present in the parallel universe.

Comment Re:Perl lets me do what I want (Score 2) 192

You don;t have to worry -- your Perl 5 code is safe, since there is no directive at all being pushed to "replace" Perl 5 with Perl 6. They will exist as sister languages, won't fight each other when installed together, and there is a thriving Perl 5 community actively developing and maintaining Perl 5 for the forseeable future.

Comment Re:Hurrah for performance improvements! (Score 1) 192

This is a tremendous improvement. The best they'd ever managed with Parrot was "abysmally slow." Before that, perl 6 implementations ranged from "diabolically slow" to "the madness-inducing manifestation of the visage of Gn'oguracha, Elder Slug-God of Unspeed."

Hilarious. And yes it was very, very, very, slow. And yes it continues to speed up. At this point it's OK for scripts that run occasionally, and for some medium-duty stuff if you don't mind spending a bit of time doing some tweaking-you-shouldn't-have to.

Comment Re:Betteridge (Score 1) 192

In other words it is the SystemD of programming languages compared to Perl 5.

I've found several choices made by systemd relatively deplorable. I find Perl 6's choices rational and convenient, pretty much all of them. So no.

Comment Re:Enjoy years of splitting between 5 and 6 (Score 3, Interesting) 192

To be clear, what I meant to say is, I only have to rewrite those portions I feel like rewriting: you can use Perl 5 from inside a Perl 6 file pretty painlessly these days, as long as you aren't looking for heavy performance or too much complex async. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are considered more "sister languages" than a necessary upgrade, with Perl 5 continued to be maintained and even developed.

Comment Re:Perl is more expressive (Score 1) 192

Languages need to scale to talent, so a codebase maintained by veterans of the language can use advanced constructs, while a codebase meant to be maintained by newbies can stick to the babytalk. Which is where Perl 5's flexibility can be leveraged well. I think you'll find Perl 6 to be a joy to work with, and if you have the privilege of working with a devel team that gets good at it, it will be an awesome experience, plus you can still "talk down" for stuff you need to throw to the public to maintain.

Comment Re:Wahoo I can open my 2003 Christmas presents (Score 1) 192

No, you may be thinking of an early prototype, named pugs, written in Haskell as part of the whirpool design process. The pool has whirled several times since then. I really admire the attention to detail that's been put into the Perl 6 specification and the implementation is coming along nicely and is already very usable for both small ad-hoc scripts and larger stuff, too. Just not for high performance quite yet and a few places where you have to work around some TODOs.

Open Source

Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? 192

An anonymous reader writes Larry Wall has reportedly announced at Fosdem that "Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015." From the article: "There is going to be the inevitable discussions, comments and probably some mileage from detractors to come. However ever were it so, for us in the Perl Community these are quite exciting times. We have two strong languages and a strong community, I think there is a lot that binds us together so here's looking forward to Christmas."

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