So far the initial response to my three-value logic in Perl post has been great. Due to that response, on Reddit, Perlmonks, here and my RT queue has led to:
Made sorting a bit more useful
Contemplating removing stringification
Plenty of strengthening of the documentation (including making it explicitly clear that the unknown logic is akin to SQL's NULL)
Bad news. You've a brand-new CEO and he has a reputation for having a short temper. He knows about his reputation so he's decided to win over the employees by offering all "underpaid" employees a salary increase of $3,000 per year. You've been tasked to write the code. Fortunately, it's fairly straight-forward.
foreach my $employee (@employees) {
if ( $employee->salary < $threshold ) {
increase_salary( $employee, 3_000 );
}
}
Congratulations. You just got fired and have to find a new job. Here's what went wrong and a new way to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Currently Jonathan hopes to allow NQP (Not Quite Perl) to cross-compile itself to the JVM within a month and hopefully have Rakudo on the JVM in a "good state" before the summer conference season. He stresses that this is a an estimate, not a guarantee. Also, it appears to be more of an exploration of how well the JVM will cope with this sort of language (my words, not his).
Given the exciting developments, I decided to start taking a serious look at Perl 6 again. I read the red-black tree implementation in Perl 6 and decided to write up an explanation to both help you see what Perl 6 can do and to refamiliarize myself with the language. Please don't be discouraged by how complicated some of the explanation will sound: red-black tree implementations can be a bit daunting for someone who's never delved into them before. In fact, most of your Perl 6 code will be fairly straight-forward. This example is deliberately chosen because of the diversity of different features it uses to create something very powerful.
Now let's get a brief understanding of what red-black trees are.
First, I want to apologize. My follow-up to the Perl 7 post was not very polite. When I predicted that "nothing" would happen, even if people wanted it, I could have said that in a much kinder way. In particular, my apologies to Ricardo for that.
As for "Perl 7", let me be clear: I don't support it. I originally asked the question because I wanted to know what people thought and instead of kicking over a rock to see what was underneath, I kicked over a hornets nest. More importantly (to me), I got my answer in spades.
The problem (as I see it) is that while we as an echo chamber don't
have anything new to offer compared to 5.10 (roughly speaking), the
wider world never looked past 5.6. This is an effort to fix that (and
only that). Did linux 3.0 have anything new to offer? We can even "blame
Linus" for the reasoning behind such a jump.
Looking at all of this, I have a small prediction to make.
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