<putter> audreyt: say you sat down with a copy of yourself, similar CS capabilities (perhaps not as yet identical reading lists), but who had never hear of perl or p6. how would you describe p6? what about it is not just "another been there and done that" language? what is its "related work" connection to the rest of the field?
<putter> I'd love to read a transcript of that conversation.
<audreyt> I think p6 is mostly about reconciling irreconcillable gaps.
<audreyt> prototype vs class-based; multi dispatch vs constrained types; inheritance vs interface; typesafety vs ducktyping; early vs late binding; etc
<audreyt> some of them are socially irreconcillable, some of them provably irreconcillable. but p6 reconciles them anyway.
Hmm. A more detailed/comprehensive list of such gaps may be interesting.
Hmm, let's not forget the one that has been (and continues to be) hardest for me to accept: linguistics and mathematics. For example, I'm convinced that we can't have our cake and eat it too with junctions, and it looks like linguistics wins in this case.
Incidentally, a "premature optimization" fear wrt junctions has caused me to look at MMD algorithms that can incorporate both static and dynamic information.
Posted by: Luke Palmer | 2006.01.25 at 03:00 PM