<story><title>Why Perl 6 is different</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2010/04/why-perl-6-is-different.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>There&apos;s a presentation that Larry Wall gave at Google that has a lot to do with the internals of Perl 6: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIWdJVP-wo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIWdJVP-wo&lt;/a&gt; Actually, to be honest, I don&apos;t recommend it, I found it surprisingly dull in delivery (sorry, Larry), but the contents were very interesting.&lt;p&gt;I actually think describing Perl 6 as &quot;having macros&quot; is accurate, but gives the wrong impression. It doesn&apos;t &quot;have&quot; macros, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;made&lt;/i&gt; of macros. The whole language is made of macros and you are nearly begged to extend it with more grammar. Or you can throw theirs away and write your own for something. Or you can throw theirs away, take some of it as a base, and extend it.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a wild, wacky experiment that needs to be done. Whatever happens, we&apos;ll learn a lot. My intuition says &quot;collapses under its own complexity&quot; (especially after trying to add a few grammar-modifying CPAN modules) is the most likely result, but I fully support with no sarcasm someone trying this out in case my intuition is wrong. It&apos;s not just Lisp redux, it&apos;s something new.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Perl 6 is different</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2010/04/why-perl-6-is-different.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thyrsus</author><text>My understanding is that Perl 6 is the polar opposite of lisp, in this sense:  In lisp, the code is always and everywhere already in a parse tree, and can be manipulated easily by, e.g., macros;  Perl 5, on the other hand, is the most unparsable language possible: see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393&lt;/a&gt;.  What perl 6 does is own the parsing problem, and respond by incorporating super powerful parsing tools.  Unfortunately, I believe that perl 6 retains its dynamic syntax, so parsing of perl 6 itself is still an uncertain adventure, and not something one can incorporate unconstrained into one&apos;s metaprogramming.  I&apos;d love to be wrong about that; am I?  If so, can someone recommend a tutorial on perl 6 metaprogramming?</text></comment>