What is Python's answer to Perl 6?

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

Parrot was originally intended to run both Perl 6 and Perl 5. Adding

Python was an afterthought, and somewhat a consequence of an
April Fools joke. Some people think it still is.

People have also been working on running PHP on Parrot, a Forth-like
language is reimplemented on Parrot, and Parrot developers are taking
Ruby into account as well. I don't know how much of an afterthought
Python-on-Parrot was, but it's certainly not a minor subject right now.

Regards,

Dirkjan

 

[Jon Perez]

The list of features for Python 3000 is described in PEP 3000,
appropriately enough:

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-3000.html

Most of the suggested changes remove redundancy, such as removing
now-unneeded built-in functions and language features.

Which I heartily concur with as being what should be one of
the primary goals...

TIMTOWTDI and ad hoc feature development are exactly what
makes Perl source code so unwieldy and inelegant.

 

[Y2KYZFR1]

Hello,

another Perl/Python question: the subject says it all.

Perl is going to change dramatically to become a more powerful and
easier to (read|write) language.

Is Python taking a similar step (-> Python 3) some time in the near future?

Reinhold

nice troll bait . . .

Python has always been the most READABLE and WRITABLE language, and
will continue to be extremely MAINTANCE friendly.

Perl has always been a WRITE only, MAINTANCE nightmare language. For
MANY reasons.
Nothing in the Perl 6 docs leads me to believe that it will be any
less cryptic and obfuscated and propeller head appealing than 5. More
complicated if anything.

 

[gabriele renzi]

Dirkjan Ochtman ha scritto:

People have also been working on running PHP on Parrot, a Forth-like
language is reimplemented on Parrot, and Parrot developers are taking
Ruby into account as well. I don't know how much of an afterthought
Python-on-Parrot was, but it's certainly not a minor subject right now.

don't forget that they can run brainf**k

Anyway, an interesting reading on the subject is the blog from dan sugalski
www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog
especially when he goes deep in how to work out stuff like 'how to call
finalizers in languages that have totally different concepts of it'

 

[Peter Maas]

It is trivial to make something that implements a subset of the language
run faster than something that implements the entire language.

This is why while I am optimistic and hopeful, I don't consider current
running speeds to be evidence that they will win.

To expect someone to fail who wants to reimplement a faster Python fulfils
my definition of pessimism.

Mit freundlichen Gruessen,

Peter Maas

 

[Reinhold Birkenfeld]

nice troll bait . . .

Yes, I confess, the article was intendedly trolly. But I got interesting
views on the issue, and for that I want to thank you all.

Python has always been the most READABLE and WRITABLE language, and
will continue to be extremely MAINTANCE friendly.

Perl has always been a WRITE only, MAINTANCE nightmare language. For
MANY reasons.
Nothing in the Perl 6 docs leads me to believe that it will be any
less cryptic and obfuscated and propeller head appealing than 5. More
complicated if anything.

I read through the Apocalypses, etc., and my first thought was: Wow, so
many features! But afterwards I realized that this featurism combined
with Perl ideology MUST lead to a total confusion in programming.

Perl is neat as long as it does what you mean - it helps you in that,
but once the DWIMmyness is too dumb to realize what you want, you have a
double-hard time finding a solution.

Reinhold

 

[Stefan Behnel]

Shrug. I cannot get excited about a proprietary Microsoft platform.
If anyone wants to port IronPython to Mono, I suspect the path is
clear (although maybe not - I don't know the license for that.)

IronPython 0.6 happily runs on Mono without recompiling. I only tried it
under Linux, but their web site states that it also runs under
Mono/Windows (and maybe other ports of Mono).

The problem is that it is currently more or less unusable because of the
missing stdlib, assert statements and many other things.

Stefan