Larry Wall Speaks at Google

Maybe Perl 6 will have meta-language power enough to equal the macro system? Not only does it have full-on raging macros, you can redefine the languages own syntax inline. Check out one of Larry's recent talks about STD.pm (here's a Google Tech Talk from last year, which is nowhere near as funny as Larry usually is, but is still quite informative: [this video] )for a real "when you see it, you'll shit bricks" moment. Perl 6 is far more intimidating than I ever realized. They seem to have looked at everything good about Perl (and a handful of other languages) and said, "Let's do a lot more of that." It's somewhat scary how much more of "that" they've done. So, there's macros from Lisp, lazy evaluation from Haskell, redefine-able grammar and syntax from I dunno where, a new regex language, etc. It takes TMTOWTDI to obscene new heights (kinda like Lisp). If power is the sole determining factor in what language you choose, there's a strong case to be made that Perl 6 is the one you want. I don't know that I entirely buy that (if I did, I guess I'd be using Lisp), but I'm hopeful that the real result of Perl 6 will be a language as capable as Lisp with a community and library culture as strong as Perl 5.

There's a presentation that Larry Wall gave at Google that has a lot to do with the internals of Perl 6: [this video] Actually, to be honest, I don't recommend it, I found it surprisingly dull in delivery (sorry, Larry), but the contents were very interesting. I actually think describing Perl 6 as "having macros" is accurate, but gives the wrong impression. It doesn't "have" macros, it's made of macros. The whole language is made of macros and you are nearly begged to extend it with more grammar. Or you can throw theirs away and write your own for something. Or you can throw theirs away, take some of it as a base, and extend it. It's a wild, wacky experiment that needs to be done. Whatever happens, we'll learn a lot. My intuition says "collapses under its own complexity" (especially after trying to add a few grammar-modifying CPAN modules) is the most likely result, but I fully support with no sarcasm someone trying this out in case my intuition is wrong. It's not just Lisp redux, it's something new.