My first web development projects were done on Perl 4, so I still have a soft place in my heart for Perl. I have since become quite an avid PHP programmer, loving the fact that it has some nice (though not great) object structure (especially in PHP5) and everything you could ever want to do with a web script is built right into the php binary.

A friend of mine just returned from a lecture by one of the head honchos working on Perl, most specifically the new Perl 6. It sounds like the new Perl has abandoned trying to be backwards compatible with the older Perls (hurray!) It has also suped up its object structure to be very OO compliant, including good multiple inheritance. They have also really worked on multi-threading and being thread-safe to take advantage of the hyperthreading and multi-processor systems which are available.

Apparently, their regular expressions (unarguably the best thing to come out of Perl) is twice as fast as Perl5.

And their interpreting engine will run Perl5, Perl6, PHP, Ruby, Java, and several other languages. NICE!

Now, if we could only get them to imbed more functionality in the executable instead of having to download 90% of the programming language off of CPAN before beginning to code, I might convert back.

Well, probably not.

It sounds very promising, though.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Development Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.