Perl 6 : the language that is easier to read than to write
As I was sitting in Jonathan Worthington's talk about Perl 6 signatures this morning, it struck me how easy it was to read the code he was showing. The intent was always very clear, it was short and to the point, and just made sense.
But then I looked closer, and there were a lot of sigils, *, := and so on, and I could not see myself writing this. Now the fact that I have never actually written any Perl 6 might explain that ;--) I will see what the learning curve is when I start using Perl 6 for good.
Still, it looks to me like the necessary complexity of code is pushed into a compact and for me quite overwhelming syntax. Which is probably as good a place as any to put it.
It's still quite striking though that Perl 6 might turn out to be a language that is easier to read than to write. Some might say that this makes it the exact opposite of Perl 5!
Perl and XML and stuff
Funny, some might say Perl 5 is hard to write because of all the punctuation characters and syntactical corner cases. But once you learn it, it's not actually a problem for day to day programming. I think the same will go for Perl 6.
Yup, foreigners, i.e. people not familiar with a language, are turned off by symbols / punctuation characters because they are used differently in each language, while words like "print", "say" instantly feel familiar.
So when you don't know Perl (or Perl 6) and try read it, it's hard because of all the unfamiliar symbols.
But the problem goes away once you're familiar with the symbols.
Same with mathematics.