Perl 6

I see the official release of the Perl 6 language specification happened on Christmas day.

The first piece of commercial web development I did was in Perl 5. A lot of people can probably say the same thing. This one was a content-management system led by James Elson in 1999 at PSWeb Ltd, a small agency in Farringdon that renamed itself to Citria and expanded rapidly during 1999-2001 before deflating even more rapidly when the dotcom bust arrived.

My recollection was that this particular CMS only ever had one customer, the BBC, who used it only for their very small Digital Radio site. But I still have a copy of the code and on inspection it turns out to have some comments that must have been added during a later project, so perhaps it did get deployed elsewhere. It was a neat, unambitious system (that’s a good thing, James is a tasteful guy) that presented a dynamic inline-editing blocks-based admin interface on a backend URL while generating static pages at the front end.

I remember there was an open question, for a time, about whether the company should pursue a product strategy and make this first CMS, or something like it, the basis of its business, or else take up a project strategy and use whatever technology from whichever provider seemed most appropriate for each client. The latter approach won out. It’s interesting to speculate about the other option.

(I like to imagine that the release of Perl 6 is sparking tiresome reminiscences like this from ageing programmers across the world.)

Perl 6 looks like an interesting language. (It’s a different language from Perl 5, not compatible with it.) The great strength of Perl was of course its text-processing capacity, and for all the fun/cute/radically-unmaintainable syntax showcased on the Perl 6 site, it’s clear that that’s still a big focus. Perl 6 appears to be the first language to attempt to do the right thing with Unicode from the ground up: that is, to represent text as Unicode graphemes, rather than byte strings (like C/C++), awkward UTF-16 sequences (Java), or ISO-10646 codepoint sequences (Python 3). This could, in principle, mean your ad-hoc botched-together text processing script in Perl 6 has a better chance of working reliably across multilingual inputs than it would in any other language. Since plenty of ad-hoc botched-together text processing still goes on in companies around the world, that has the feel of a good thing.