But with an essay or other generic prose format, it can be difficult to tell just when the thesis will be delivered, and therefore there is more cognitive load in investigating the content.
To that end, I thought I would provide a simple, easily read (and probably easily dismissed) list of the reasons that Perl 6 is a programming language that you should be exploring.
Before we start, though, let's determine what constitutes a valid reason to learn a new programming language. Certainly necessity is quite common. I learned BASIC in the 1980s because it was the only language I had available to me on my Tandy Color Computer (dubbed "CoCo" by its users). I didn't chose BASIC, it chose me. Today, this is commonly the case when people take a job or attend a course which uses a particular language. Perl 6 is obviously too new a language to impose itself on people in this way, so that's certainly not on the list.
If you are not forced to use a particular language, then it comes down to utility, but utility functions are complicated beasts, especially when talking about ways of expressing ideas. As an excellent example, let's look at Perl's (and many of its predecessor languages') use of a prefix (or suffix) character to indicate a data type. In Perl this has traditionally been a dollar sign for scalar (singular) values, at-sign for arrays and percent for hashes (sometimes called dictionaries or more technically unordered associative lists in other languages). This affords Perl a great deal of flexibility. Variables can be called out in strings (e.g. "I am $name") and there is no such thing as a reserved word for variables (e.g. $while is perfectly valid). It also gives someone reading code the opportunity to quickly scan for variable usage and visually pattern-match the "shape" of the code.
But to non-Perl programmers, this feature often induces frustration. It's harder to read code initially when you're not used to this convention. So, does this make Perl a good or bad language to learn?
For the sake of this article, I'm going to say that it has no impact. I'm only interested in language features which will either improve the quality of code or the capabilities of the programmer. For example, learning any Algol-derived language from C to Perl to Java, etc. will teach a programmer to understand code in any language that mixes procedural function calling with mathematically-inspired infix operators. This is an important skill in the world of modern programming languages, and it will improve the ability of the programmer to learn nearly any modern language. Getting used to variables with prefixes won't really change the way you code or enable you to learn other languages, so it wouldn't be nearly as useful as this.
Okay, so on to the list...
Number 6: Grammars
While many people tout Perl 6 grammars as the primary innovation of the language, I'm going to place it at number six, here, because it's not really the most fundamental shift you will experience in the language. Still, it needs to be on this list. Just about every language has access to a parser generator, but Perl 6 places the parser directly into the language as a first-class feature. In fact, the language uses its own grammar feature to parse itself!
Essentially this is the ability to define a parser much the way you would define a class. Grammars can derive from each other like classes, and they can even have attributes much as a class would (this is because, under the hood, they use the same infrastructure in the language as a class).
One thing that I think this will improve is the reliability of programs that need to access user-provided data. All too often, user data is handled with poorly crafted regular expressions that either fail to express the possible complexity of user input or don't sufficiently constrain it due to the limitations of regexes.
Number 5: Modern OO
In most modern OO languages, features such as a metaobject protocol, automatic initializers and accessors and the like are commonplace. This is certainly the case with Perl 6, but the language goes far beyond this. Trait-like roles that can be generics, monkey-patching objects, indirect method invocation, redispatch, and dozens of other advanced features are combined in Perl 6's object system making it a joy to use in a diverse array of use-cases.
Number 4: Laziness
If you are used to languages like CommonLisp or Haskell, you will know the power of lazy evaluation being the default. Unlike languages that have token access to generators and iterators, Perl 6 and the other languages I mentioned, provide laziness as a primary mode of accessing sequential data. It's almost always the case that laziness is involved in any such transaction and often in a way that is transparent to the user. For example, constructing a range from a variable start point to a variable end point is fairly common in most languages, but you usually have to use an alternate mechanism is either of those endpoints are going to be infinite. In Perl 6, there is no such distinction. Ranges behave the same no matter what their endpoints might be.
Number 3: Deep Gradual Typing
It's possible to construct a function in Perl 6 which takes a scalar variable and does something with it, regardless of its type. In fact, that's the default. However, if you want to specify a type for a parameter, you can. The type of an input parameter is checked and if it matches, you're good to go.
But that's only the start. The "where" operator allows the programmer to further constrain a parameter in a dynamic way (e.g. requiring that a numeric parameter falls within a specific range) and the "subset" operator allows the declaration of a type-like name that includes such parameterization. This allows a mix of static and duck typing in a convenient syntax.
This typing goes further, allowing constraints on the contents of sequential and associative data types, class interface assertions (through "roles") and many other advanced type management features.
Number 2: Slangs
Slangs are variations on Perl 6's parser. They can be defined at runtime in Perl 6 and can be used lexically like a variable definition. A slang allows anything from a trivial feature change (perhaps you want a conditional block that used the keyword "maybe") to more substantial additions (say, adding a quoting operator for JSON data that validates the data at compile-time) to fundamental replacements of the parser (e.g. to lexically scope a block of Perl 5 code).
Slangs offer the ultimate in language flexibility, and because the underlying runtime is so flexible and full-featured, nearly anything you might want to do is possible. Want to define a Python object with Python's method call semantics? It's just a matter of getting in there and writing the code!
Number 1: Access to Perl 5 and C
Through the "Inline::" modules, Perl 6 has access to Perl 5 and C code. This immediately gives the language access to two of the largest suites of libraries in the world. Essentially, from day 1, Perl 6 has more library support than any language I have ever seen as this stage of development.
While new features are all well and good, one of the crippling problems with many new languages is that they have very few features available to them through library code. This is why the JVM is such a popular platform for new languages, but constraining implementation to one VM is hardly the right solution to such problems.
Honorable mentions
There are too many great features in Perl 6 to mention in one document, but a few that didn't quite make the list are:
- Automatic use of rationals for integer division
- The most advanced Unicode handling I have ever seen
- True concurrency without a GIL
