I followed the development of perl 6 for a bit. I was quite impressed for a while, as Larry Wall disolved most of the warts, corner cases, and ad-hocisms of perl 5 into a language which was cleaner and more abstract. Then he used the cognitive space thus provided to load up the langauge with as many features as he could pack in, and I gave up on it.
Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
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Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#12I'm the rare person who never used Perl 5 but is trying to learn Perl 6. I haven't progressed beyond very simple scripts, but it's interesting. I especially am interested in the grammars, so I'll try to find a task where I'd get to explore them.
I have no plans to try and ship software written in it.
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#13I honestly haven't heard of anyone using Perl for anything new. Sure there is a lot of legacy Perl 5 being used and maintained, but Perl 6? For a new project? I've never even seen it on a short list.
ZipRecruiter, Booking.com, Duck Duck Go, and Craigslist are still building new things in Perl 5. It's out there still, you just have to hunt for it. Here's a site that lists Perl projects and companies:
http://www.builtinperl.com
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#14follow-up: for a non-Perl person, who is incredibly interested in getting started with Perl 6, are there any good resources (code examples, blog posts exploring language concepts unique to Perl 6) that anyone would recommend?
I believe some folks recommended the examples on Rosetta code for getting a feel about Perl idioms to me. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Perl_6
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#15To a large degree, the ongoing utility of Perl 6 depends upon the continued vibrancy of the CPAN community. IMHO, CPAN is anything but vibrant by today's standards.
While CPAN hosts a vast archive of nearly 35,000 modules[1], many are aging. Fewer than 800 modules are known to exist for Perl 6.[2]
[1] http://www.modulecounts.com/ [2] https://modules.perl6.org/
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use perl for new code all the time. It's not a trendy language, so it won't get much coverage on HN, but the language and libraries are great IMO. Also, perl 6 is effectively a completely different language from 'normal' perl (i.e. perl 5.x). The difference between the two is far far bigger than say python 2 -> 3. As a perl programmer, I see no obvious benefit from switching from perl 5 -> 6, it would be the same a…
IIRC there's a module for parsing and running Perl 5 in 6. Am I wrong or is it not practically useful?
I think you mean Inline::Perl5: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5. It doesn't parse Perl 5 and run it inside of Perl 6 though, it just runs the Perl 5 interpreter for you from a Perl 6 program and lets you marshall data between the interpreters. It's a legitimate technique.
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#17I've been using it locally to write a few small scripts, nothing publicly available (yet). Traits and roles are really neat - they feel like a natural conclusion to what Ruby started building upon with respect to metaprogramming natural syntax and encouraging developer happiness over strictness. On the whole, however, many small parts of Perl 6 feel immature. There's no core JSON/YAML module, and there's no "official…
they've moved on to zef for modules.
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#18use perl5 instead because it is already there on unix systems. Use it to collect infrastructure data, scrape logs, query databases, or even for some statistics/math on the fly. If on an island I will take perl5 (and golang :-) I had hopes for perl6 but it got cumbersome in practice ...
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#19reading through the docs in perl 6 is really fun and I'm similarly interested in it. I think, however, that it will take some dedicated usage to get momentum going so you are stuck in a catch 22. :)
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#20I've been using it locally to write a few small scripts, nothing publicly available (yet). Traits and roles are really neat - they feel like a natural conclusion to what Ruby started building upon with respect to metaprogramming natural syntax and encouraging developer happiness over strictness. On the whole, however, many small parts of Perl 6 feel immature. There's no core JSON/YAML module, and there's no "official…
BTW, the source for Panda is very clear and readable, I was just glancing it and am able to reason about it even though I only superficially know Perl 5 to write some dirty scripts and the code is sparsely commented.