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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?

#81

Post by hedora »

Thaxll wrote: post #77

I'll be downvoted for that but isn't Perl been replaced by Python in the last 7-8 years? I've never seen Perl used in the companies I've worked for in the past 6 years.

I think python adoption is kinda an overreaction to perl 5's warts: for example, too much punctuation switches to too little.

Python does a few things much better than perl 5. The obvious ones are the REPL and support for C bindings. However, I still find it miserable to work with.

Hopefully, perl 6 learned from python's mistakes (as well as from perl 5's mistakes).

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

#82

Post by melezhik »

markstos wrote: post #40

I 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…

> having the frontend and backend in the same language is big benefit

Hi! Why so?

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

#83

Post by joelberger »

Perl 6 looks very promising. It was an attempt to brush up Perl 5 but became its own language with a very unfortunate name (read: Perl 6 will not replace Perl 5). It has some very interesting features, including the built-in concurrency primitives and the oft-mentioned grammars.

It is still very new (from a release time perspective). I don't expect there are very many large-scale real-world usages yet. I do wish that the Perl 6 community would spend a little more time on advocacy but thankfully there are several books on the way and hopefully that will start breaking out of the echo chamber and introducing the language to the masses.

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

#84

Post by CodeWriter23 »

zoffix222 wrote: post #45

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 peop…

Thanks. Your comment has uniquely challenged my skepticism and hesitancy around Perl 6. I mean that with sincerity.

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

#85

Post by v64 »

v64 wrote: post #46
marvy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

s/One Day/One Way/

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

#86

Post by rihegher »

larodi wrote: post #69
rihegher wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I stand corrected - my statement is indeed not backed by concrete evidence, but my personal experience and is mostly related to job findings where some legacy Perl5 needs to be supported or amended. Though, I'm more or less surprised that things are as you say in France.

If you want to check by yourself here is the popular french job board for web related stuff: https://remixjobs.com search JS or javascript: hundreds of results. and then search Perl: 1 result.

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

#87

Post by mempko »

I wrote PKafka (https://github.com/mempko/PKafka) a year ago, a Perl 6 wrapper around the rdkafka library. I just started using it in a production system a week ago.

I feel that Perl 6 is an amazing language. The regex and grammars are fantastic for doing any sort of parsing. The built in support for reactive programming and gradual typing with the given/when syntax is fantastic. The type constraint and multi dispatch mechanism is also great.

However, only until the latest release 2017-01, did I feel the MoarVM is stable enough for production use.

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

#88

Post by marvy »

v64 wrote: post #46
marvy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that big a change? Then maybe they should have changed the name after all. Purl?

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

#89

Post by b2gills »

vgy7ujm wrote: post #30

Was very interested some years ago but lately I think many of the things I don't like with for example C# has snuck into the syntax. Capital letter keywords etc. Wish it was more like Perl 5 and more performant. But we shall see, it might change a lot the next years as it matures.

I can't think of a single capitalized keyword.

Unless you mean capitalized built-in classes, or the infix meta operators.

Certain parts are faster than Perl 5, for example this finds the sum of a range in less than a millisecond. ( of course it cheats by calling the sum method on the Range object )

    my $sum = [+] 1..100000000000000000000000;
That was the syntax for a left fold using the infix numeric addition operator. ( You can use just about any infix operator there and it will be a right fold if the operator says that is what it should do )

There are other places where if you write your code carefully knowing the ins and outs of the implementation, where Perl 6 is faster than you could get in Perl 5.

Then there is the fact that a lot of optimizations that are known about aren't being done, and a new JIT is in the works for MoarVM.

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

#90

Post by tyingq »

gkya wrote: post #75
larodi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still chuckle, and try to remind everyone in the room that: 1) Node did not invent concurrency, Hoare did (if a single person should ever be credited on this), others understood the concept some 20 years. 2) Node was originally based on a library by a very-controversial, still largely acclaimed Perl contributor 3) 'use strict' is indeed a Perl idea, but (to a certain extent) is the JSON format 4) The first JS repos…

Whenever Node comes up somewhere, I wonder what happened to the original author of it, he was called Ryan, IIRC.

Ryan Dahl.

"Update on 11/24/2016: Dan Shaw, one of the founders of Node Source and NodeUp podcast said at SFNode that Ryan Dahl is into AI and machine learning."[1]

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-Ryan-Dahl

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