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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?

#41

Post by alekratz »

hyperpape wrote: post #14
alekratz wrote: post #8

follow-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

Thanks for the suggestion. Things like Rosetta Code and Learn X in Y minutes always seem to flee from my headspace when I ask these questions.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#42

Post by smueller1234 »

bebna wrote: post #29

Perhaps you should look at this two presentations first: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292... https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2

Without trying to defend the merits of the language: I've watched the videos and those presentations were entertaining and nothing more. It's essentially well received trolling. The presenter knows the language so poorly that he conflated some core concepts as well as mixing up the distinction of issues in libraries versus in the language itself.

Really. There's lots of things wrong with Perl (all versions) and the same can be said about any other language. Alas these talks are among the worst put together criticisms I've seen so far.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#43

Post by gkya »

bashcoder wrote: post #34
marvy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Perl user, but surely 800 is pretty good for a one year old language? How many did Perl 5 have when it was one year old? (That's a trick question: CPAN was officially launched about year after Perl 5 came out; see here http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html )

Fair point, but it's also fair to note that Perl 6 development began 17 years ago.

Well you don't develop modules for a language yet to be released.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#44

Post by brudgers »

I considered Perl 6 for a deep dive at the end of 2015...just as it was 'officially released'. The difficulty for me was the state of the documentation ecosystem. No dead-tree books (but for one that was written more than a decade earlier) and a lot of information ad hocked up in blogs and slides. I just felt like I could not really get a handle on it...While googling 'Perl 6' sort of worked, 'Perl 6 how do I ' type queries pretty much ignored the "6" and landed me on Perl 5 resources. Perl 6 still only has ~300 StackOverflow questions.

I'm still interested in it, but it just doesn't work for me as an ecosystem yet.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#45

Post by zoffix222 »

Biased core dev here...

I've used Perl 6 for IRC bots. The ease of writing parallel code, nice OO model, multi dispatch, and subsets make it very pleasant to do them in Perl 6. Here's a bot I wrote that listens for GitHub webhooks and reports new commits and PRs: https://github.com/perl6/geth and here's another one that's just a bunch of random features: https://github.com/zoffixznet/perl6-buggable/

I also heard people say grammars are the most note-worthy feature of Perl 6 and people basically use them to quickly hack up a nice little micro-language in which they then attack their problem. Before I came to Perl 6 I was dumb as shoe when it came to writing parsers, but I find it trivial to do with Perl 6 grammars.

Do I like it? Although I'm obviously biased, I love the language. It lets you write beautifully concise, yet still readable, code. It even lets you use much more readable syntax for regexes. Somewhat regretfully, it made it very difficult for me to learn other languages, as in them I end up writing 3x, 4x, 6x the amount of code and I keep getting reminded of Larry Wall saying Perl 6 would be the last language you'd learn. In Perl 6 I can "talk"; in other languages, I write "code".

However, while the language is fantastic, the implementation still has a lot of work to be done to polish it off. It's basically a 1.0 release. Unlike Go, Rust, or Swift, there isn't a giant corporation behind Perl 6 that can just throw money at problems until they disappear. Compared to other languages, some things are still unoptimized and are much slower. I spotted some leakage that makes it problematic for very-long-running (months) programs. About 65 new bug tickets are opened per month. The test suite is pretty sparse in some areas (which is the likely reason for many of the new bug tickets). But... three new core developers joined this January, so hopefully all that will get improved pretty fast.

Someone in the comments also mentioned the baby-sized ecosystem... Since Perl 6 lets you use C libraries without needing to compile anything, people wrote stuff like Inline::Perl5 and Inline::Python that let you import and even subclass stuff from Perl 5 and Python. And that's a bit of a double-edge sword: yes, it's trivial to use libraries from Perl 5 and Python, but it also stunts the ecosystem; no one has enough motivation to re-invent the wheel in Perl 6 when the wheels from other languages are reasonably usable.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#46

Post by v64 »

marvy wrote: post #24
joosters wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

As someone who still occasionally has to write Perl 5 for a living, Perl 6 really is a new language. And because Perl 6 isn't as mainstream as Ruby or Python, there is a bigger culture shock when trying to find resources or figure out the "right way" to do things (I know, I know, There Is More Than One Day To Do It). There are big changes to the syntax too that make it feel like less of a successor and more of a new language inspired by an old one.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#47

Post by rihegher »

larodi wrote: post #32

Substantial 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…

"Perl devs are probably 2x the price of a JS guy..." Funny that here in France it is quite the contrary which leads me and others Perl dev friends accepting JS work as Perl5 and even more Perl6 work are harder and harder to find.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#48

Post by throwaway7645 »

xaduha wrote: post #5

For a long time I thought that Perl 6 would be close to an ideal language for me. I haven't really questioned that belief, but it turns out http://www.red-lang.org is much closer. Let's say that I'm glad that Perl 6 is there as an option.

Gosh yes I'm excited for Red Lang too.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#49

Post by zoffix222 »

bebna wrote: post #29

Perhaps you should look at this two presentations first: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292... https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2

Heard of that video. It's about Perl 6's sister language, Perl 5. And the presenter basically did this for shits and giggles. Even the module that supposedly has the exploits he talks about hasn't been recommended to use for over a decade.

Re: Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?

#50

Post by zoffix222 »

brudgers wrote: post #44

I considered Perl 6 for a deep dive at the end of 2015...just as it was 'officially released'. The difficulty for me was the state of the documentation ecosystem. No dead-tree books (but for one that was written more than a decade earlier) and a lot of information ad hocked up in blogs and slides. I just felt like I could not really get a handle on it...While googling 'Perl 6' sort of worked, 'Perl 6 how do I ' type…

FWIW, a huge amount of work has been done to docs in the past year. There's even a dead-tree book available now (https://deeptext.media/perl6-at-a-glance/ ), with 3 more slated to release later this year.
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