
Larry Wall Presents: Perl 6 - justinator
http://perl6releasetalk.ticketleap.com/perl-tech-talk/details
======
luckydude
Maybe I'll get down voted but I really think perl 4.036 was the best perl. It
was already weird with all the $this and @that but it was such a pleasant
language that when I was at Sun I proposed rewriting a pile of /usr/bin in
perl. We had already made stuff slow as crap with unicode support so why not?
Didn't happen, Sun pulled the unicode support to get back C level perf.

Call me crazy, I love me some perl 4. That release was brilliant.

~~~
Diederich
Perl4 was my first Perl. I was a hard-core C programmer at the time, and Perl4
was just seriously fun.

By the way, I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5. So,
feel free to roll with Perl4!

~~~
raiph
> I think most Perl4 programs will run on the latest Perl 5.

I think most programs that will run on the latest Perl 5 will run on the
latest Perl 6.[1]

So, yeah, feel free to roll with Perl4 and maybe mix it up with a little Perl
6 magic (eg concurrency or Unicode grapheme string handling).

[1] [https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/](https://github.com/niner/Inline-
Perl5/)

------
sp332
I don't suppose this will be live-streamed?

~~~
raiph
I hope not.

~~~
sp332
Why? Not everyone interested in this can make it to the event.

~~~
raiph
Because I think folk will be inclined to refer to and even hype this Craig's
List hosted "event" as something akin to a launch of Perl 6 1.0.

Some will be well-meaning.

Some will be malicious.

But it won't matter. Perl 6 and Larry won't be even close to ready by October
5th (imo) for the expectations and exposure that would inevitably follow.

Imo we get just one more shot at fairly easily getting a significant chunk of
the tech world to voluntarily strongly focus on Perl 6 for 15 minutes. We can
and hopefully will maintain control of _when_ that happens even if we can't
control anything else.

It's going to be damn hard (but just about doable, one hopes) to make Perl 6
good enough -- as a flawed but at least interesting 1.0 -- to withstand and
ultimately profit from the spike in scrutiny following a launch this
christmas. If we launch (in the public's eye) now, I predict we'll get widely
dismissed and will have already blown most of the unique and precious
opportunity currently still available if we instead make sure that the launch,
and perception of a launch, waits until christmas.

So, I do hope they record this Craig's List presentation for historical
purposes but keep it for private viewing only until _after_ christmas. (Or
maybe put out a very short video of some highlights, making it clear it's not
yet the launch. And maybe, just maybe, spend a couple weeks or so producing
something reasonably slick, blending highlights with some other material, to
try attract more contributors in the run up to christmas.)

Imo, Christmas really needs to wait until Christmas and I pray that it does.

