On Apr 22, 2014, at 7:21 PM, Damian Conway <dam...@conway.org> wrote:
>> It's an awesome language, which is exactly the problem. "Inspiring >> awe" is not far from inducing panic and terror, especially in people >> who aren't feeling too confident in the first place. We want to be >> accessible to the people who start looking nervous when the modulus >> operator is added to the basic four mathematical signs as operators. > > This is an important point. And an area in which I believe Perl 6 can > excel. I do think it will be possible to specify (and even enforce) suitable > subsets of the language, to make it approachable by the easily over-awed. > > >> Sorry if I'm being boringly repetitive, but I do see complexity as a >> barrier to world domination. > > No, it's an important point. I get very excited about the power and > sophistication of Perl 6. But I also get very excited about the > straightforwardness and simplicity it can offer. It's important that we > market both aspects...and to the right audiences. > > For example, at OSCON this year I'm concentrating on the simplicity > of Perl 6: > > http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/schedule/detail/33839 > > Damian One area that Perl dominated early on (but python has been making tremendous strides in): science. For example Perl (4/5) was the go-to language for biologists simply b/c it was easy to pick up and get started right away. Basically, anything that requires munging tons of data in somewhat defined but non-standard formats (think: DNA sequence formats like GenBank, FASTA, FASTQ, etc) would be a good target, particularly if one can define grammars to parse such data that could be passed on to various actions. That’s only the start, really (NCI, types, roles, etc). chris
