Perl 6 and D separated at birth
When I first learned of Perl6 and D, They seemed to me to have similar sensibilities.
One of the motto’s of the Perl community is to “Make easy things easy and hard things possible”. I find it interesting that D actually does that to some extent. It has built-in resizeable arrays, and associative arrays for example.
Perl has always tried to shield the programmer from memory management. D also does that by having a garbage collector built into the language.
Neither language has been designed for complete backwards compatibility, because it has proven limiting in their respective ancestry. ( Perl4 -> Perl5 and C -> C++ )
Both Larry Wall and Walter Bright decided that different things should look different. This helps the compiler to parse them, but also helps the programmer to tell the difference.
I suggest that everyone who wants to learn a new programming language, learns both of them. Even though there is a large overlap in design ethos, they don’t have much overlap in actual design.
Of all the new languages, these two are the only ones that don’t feel like toys, or minor improvements of earlier languages.
- Go
- Coffee Script
- Dart
- C#
- F#
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