• Syntax shouldn't dangle in the wind
• Ordinary people like me hate abstraction
• C is wonderful
• C is awful
• awk is neither
• Language is an amoral medium
• Ugly can be beautiful
• Beautiful can get ugly real quick
• Visual metaphors are for more than just poetry
• I don't care what other people think
• I care what other people think
• I think God has free will

• "We need to start over from scratch."
• "If we put in English phrases, that makes it readable."
• "Simple languages produce simple solutions."
• "If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C."
• "I thought of a way to do it, so it must be right."
• "This is a VHLL. Who cares about bits?"
• "You can do anything with NAND gates."
• "Users care about elegance."
• "The specification is good enough."
• "Abstraction equals Usability."
• "The common core should be as small as possible."
• "Let's make this easy for the computer."
• "Most programs are designed top down."
• "Text processing doesn't matter."
• "People should never have been given free will."

• Learn it once, use it many times
• Learn as you go
• Many acceptable levels of competence
• Multiple ways to say the same thing
• No shame in borrowing
• Indeterminate dimensionality
• Local ambiguity is okay
• Punctuation by prosody and inflection
• Disambiguation by number, case and word order
• Topicalization
• Discourse structure
• Pronominalization
• No theoretical axes to grind
• Style not enforced except by peer pressure
• Cooperative design
• "Inevitable" Divergence

• Compatibility
• Extensibility
• Usability
• Reusability
• Readability
• Scalability
• Maintainability
• Portability
• Responsibility
• Embeddability
• Respectability?

• The need for backward compatibility
• My leisurely mental growth
• Cultural model with too many bottlenecks
• Lack of knowledge of the future
• Lack of round tuition
• Complexity of the core
• Complacency

• Two years between 5.005 and 5.006
• Busy with new Camel book
• Busy with Perl Whirl cruise
• Busy with yapc 19100
• Busy with TPC 4.0
• The Constitutional Convention
• The Perl Porters meeting
• The big announcement

• Lexer
• Parser
• Interpreter
• Code generators
• Internal APIs
• External APIs
• Language
• Culture

mail.perl6-announce            445
mail.perl6-language           5070
mail.perl6-internals          1614
mail.perl6-build                 6
mail.perl6-stdlib              128
mail.perl6-language-mlc         44
mail.perl6-language-subs       317
mail.perl6-language-strict      81
mail.perl6-language-flow       314
mail.perl6-language-unlink       0
mail.perl6-language-io         326
mail.perl6-licenses            246
mail.perl6-language-objects    596
mail.perl6-language-errors     281
mail.perl6-language-datetime    93
mail.perl6-language-data       468
mail.perl6-language-regex      491
mail.perl6-meta                391
mail.perl6-source-control       11
mail.perl6-announce-rfc        448
mail.perl-qa                   121

• Can Larry understand it?
• Do people really need the new feature?
• Can we implement it efficiently and robustly?
• Does it preclude translation from Perl 5?
• Does the utility grow faster than the complexity?
• Does the size grow slower than Moore's Law
• Must take time to maintain Perl 5
• Must take time to design Perl 6 right

• Really does mean Request For Comment
• Written in simple POD
• Have to be well-formed to be accepted
• Subject to revision/retraction/freezing
• First one came in August 1
• Open brainstorming till September 30
• Two weeks. Hah!

• Perl must support higher level programming
• Perl must support lower level programming
• Perl must support more paradigms
• Perl must support sane version control
• Perl must support absolute flexibility
• Perl must have a lean and mean core
• Perl must not surprise people unnecessarily
• Perl must be as simple as possible, but no simpler
• Perl must remain Perl

• Non-critical built-ins move out to modules
• All variables can be used as objects
• All variables actually are objects internally (vtables)
• Strange global variables become object attributes or lexicals
• Filehandles become objects, use OO notation
• Parsing rules simplified for indirect objects
• Parsing rules simplified for subscripting, slicing, etc.
• Confusing homonyms disentangled (do, eval, etc.)
• Typeglobs go away
• XS goes away; interfaces written in low-level Perl
• Object attribute declaration standardized
• Object attribute access standardized via accessors
• Real garbage collection
• Unified OO exception handling
• Easier expression interpolation
• Possible precedence simplification?

• Dropouts
• Grading the problem
• Grading the solution
• The good, the bad, and the ugly
• Deference

• Polymorphism is your enemy for low-level programming
• Scalar type declarations

for my int $i (1..10000) {...
my num $PI : constant = atan2(1,1) * 4;
my str $delim = ":";
• Homogenous array/hash type declarations

my int @codes;
my num @coeff;
my str %words;
• Representation specifications

my int @codes :bits(4);
my num @array :shape(4,4,4);
my str %words :fixlen(20);
• Non-homogenous arrays
• Unsafe code

• Polymorphism is your friend for high-level programming
• Abstraction is allowed but not required in Perl
• More support for functional programming
• More support for logic programming
• More support for "little languages"

• History of little languages
• Using a big language as a little language
• How not to pay the price for generality

• The eval operator

• The eval operator
• BEGIN blocks
• Importation
• Overriding/overloading certain builtins
• Source filtering

• The eval operator
• BEGIN blocks
• Importation
• Importation
• Overriding/overloading certain builtins
• Source filtering
• Meta-use
• Lexer/parser written in Perl
• Ability to redefine any lexer or parser rule
• Ability to add new lexer or parser rules

• Numbers
• Strings
• Quoted constructs
• Bracketed constructs
• Operators
• Functions
• Expressions
• Blocks
• Block lists
• Subroutine definitions
• Complete compilation units

• The mechanism will be abused--so what?
• Unicode operators vs "swearing" operators
• Allows for semantic delegation like Tcl
• Metasyntactic warpage will be lexically scoped
• All is fair if you predeclare
• Must manage documentation
• Must manage semantic warpage

• XML
• Unicode
• Threading
• Safe signals