I have been programming Perl 5 for many years in the finance industry. I have not seen any Perl 6. In the last year I have been using Go in conjunction with Perl to handle some of the cases where Go solves the problem better.
Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
111–120 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#112Substantial amount of Perl6 goodness is already baked one way or another in ES6/7, Python 3.x, Scala and even the modern C# and C++14/17. Speaking of stuff like concurrency, C3 resolution, object proxies (a.k.a AUTOLOAD), introspection/reflection, promises, reasonable regex engine, etc. As far as speed is concerned - with the modern approach to concurrent programming, it does not really make a difference which of the…
None of the languages mentioned have the goodness of syntactic macros.
https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/day-23-macros-a...
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#113Mathematical Modelling,
-1 + 1 = 0
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#114I 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.
> as many features as he could pack in Aiui there's some merit to the notion of The Lisp Curse[1] and he wanted to avoid it. Do you reject the notion of the curse, or think it doesn't apply to P6, or think he overdid it, or...? Do you recall any specific features you felt went over the top? [1] eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450973
There's also a bit of fear of The Forth Curse.
For those not familiar, The Forth Curse is what happens when you make a language trivially easy to extend but don't write a large enough standard library of functions or procedures for it. Then your extensible language indeed gets easily extended at every site where it's used. The problem is that it's extended slightly differently in each place to do quite common things slightly differently and in wildly incompatible ways.
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#115Mathematical Modelling,
-1 + 1 = 0
Check Medium.com/@dayveadams
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#116Substantial amount of Perl6 goodness is already baked one way or another in ES6/7, Python 3.x, Scala and even the modern C# and C++14/17. Speaking of stuff like concurrency, C3 resolution, object proxies (a.k.a AUTOLOAD), introspection/reflection, promises, reasonable regex engine, etc. As far as speed is concerned - with the modern approach to concurrent programming, it does not really make a difference which of the…
Using your phone to hack your brain
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#117Substantial amount of Perl6 goodness is already baked one way or another in ES6/7, Python 3.x, Scala and even the modern C# and C++14/17. Speaking of stuff like concurrency, C3 resolution, object proxies (a.k.a AUTOLOAD), introspection/reflection, promises, reasonable regex engine, etc. As far as speed is concerned - with the modern approach to concurrent programming, it does not really make a difference which of the…
I chuckled the first time I saw 'use strict'; at the top of the javascript file. Node.js seems to be morphing more and more into Perl 5 with every new release.
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Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#118I worked on Perl 5 projects professionally for about 15 years, then switched to a new job that uses Node.js. I enjoyed coding in Perl 5, but it was hard to find and retain Perl 5 developers. Our later hires preferred to code in C#, Python and Ruby-- This was before Node.js took off. Looking at language trajectories on http://modulecounts.com/ The momentum that JavaScript has compared to Perl is amazing-- CPAN growth…
We should be careful when comparing the growth or package counts of CPAN and npm. While conceptually similar, they're still very different from one another. A lot of the npm growth is just the JavaScript ecosystem catching up to where CPAN was ages ago. Then there are the npm packages that add functionality that's typically included by default with Perl, so there would never really be a need for equivalent CPAN modul…
Plus there's the fashion of uploading one npm dist per function, as well as a bundled dist, for projects not using tree shaking to keep their browser bundle small.
OTOH while I'm mostly a perl hacker, there's a metric fucktonne of duplication on CPAN too, so I'm not sure that comment necessarily applies (there may be more duplication on npm, but I don't have data for that).
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#119Earlier 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…
As someone who knows neither version, I find this surprising. Surely, even if none of your code works, switching from Perl 5 to Perl 6 is much less of a "culture shock" than switching to, say, Ruby or Python?
Switching from Perl5 to Perl6 isn't completely shocking, but it's not just copying code over to a new project either. Programming in Perl6 back to back with programming in Perl5 indeed feels quite a bit like switching back and forth between Perl5 and Ruby. Everything's similar enough that you have to mind the differences. It's a much different feeling than going back and forth between C and JavaScript or between Forth and Pascal where the syntaxes are so different you'd never try the other way to do something for just a couple of lines.
Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC, Perl 6 grammars are parsing expression grammars (PEGs). I don't know if these are compiled down to recursive descent or packrat parsers; my guess would be the latter (since that's typical for PEGs).
The sibling post says that they have both || and |. The || operator sounds like ordered choice from PEGs, and | sounds like a non-deterministic choice from regexes and CFGs. So it's basically a mix of paradigms, which muddies the waters in terms of what computational complexity guarantees you can get. Pure regular expressions can be matched in linear time; CFGs in cubic time and some subsets in linear time; packrat p…
Roughly (so far as I understand it), it's PEG with an escape hatch to regexps if you really must, and it doesn't backtrack by default.
Please do have a play some time and assuming that I got the above right, donate however much money you would've been willing to bet to the Perl Foundation or the Enlightened Perl Organisation as you prefer :)