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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?

#131

Post by cutler »

b2gills wrote: post #72
cutler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl6 is not, IMHO, a completely different language and I can't understand why the Perl6 community beat this drum so hard. "use ;" "my" variables, context awareness, $@% variable identifiers, list emphasis. At the syntactic level Perl6 is very similar to Perl5. OK, it's OO under the hood, unlike Perl5. If it's a completely different language why name it Perl6?

The OO part is actually one of the tiniest of changes. You can get basically the same thing in Perl 5 by using Moose. It has signature, and subsignature parsing, built-in concurrency, not to mention over a dozen other features that are not in Perl 5. The main reason it is called Perl 6 is how the project began. It started out as Perl 5 minus a few warts. As someone who well versed in both, they are very similar, and…

Perl was my goto language for over 10 years but I lost my patience with the Perl6 for Christmas meme around 2013 by which time Ruby was a much better proposition. If the Perl5 community had finally found a way to adopt a MOP they might have had a chance of competing with Ruby and Python. I also feel Perl might have had better adoption in web development if the community had rallied round Mojolicious instead of Catalyst. Catalyst's routing via subroutine signatures is an abomination.

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

#132

Post by throwaway7645 »

qbaqbaqba wrote: post #123
branchly2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, most people have dismissed it because they think Perl 5 is dead and anything using Perl should be replaced with Python or Ruby or Go or Rust or some other language. I didn't dismiss it for that reason. I wanted to like Perl 6, but dismissed it because last time I tried learning it: * it seemed to include too much syntax * too much lingo required to understand core concepts * no coherently-written definitiv…

http://perl6intro.com/ is quite nice.

Yes, but as the author mentioned it is a far cry from a camel book. I've been told Larry is working on it, but I bet I can't buy it for at least two years if not three. We do have 3-4 other books coming out in the future, but I want a 600 page monster to make me truly understand it in and out.

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

#133

Post by throwaway7645 »

b2gills wrote: post #60
woodruffw wrote: post #6

I'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…

It sounds to me like you would like a "batteries included" version of Perl 6. (include JSON/YAML in the runtime) No. We only include things as part of the language where the design of it is immediately obvious, and is useful for many applications. It also helps if it has been proven in other languages. So Promises(Futures) are in there, but many other things are not. You can do anything in a module, so write an exter…

I appreciate the explanation, but it practice it usually means everyone has to pick and choose between a collection of bitrotted old libraries. Yes, some are consistently well maintained, but it is hit or miss. It's nice being able to "import CSV" on any python script without having to wrestle with a failed installation. I think both sides have merit.

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

#134

Post by throwaway7645 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #10

So this doesn't help with your question but I'm sure i'm not alone on this one... I hadn't even realized Perl 6 was out! I remember years ago it kind of being labeled as the "Duke Nukem Forever" of programming languages versions. I don't personally use it but I'm glad to see it is out (even if I found out a year late).

I once heard the apocalypse arrives when GNUHurd is released with perl6 & duke nukem forever running on it.

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

#135

Post by dayve »

tootie wrote: post #35
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…

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.

I've taught Perl5 & JS for 12 years. (7+ Perl, 5+ JS)

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

#136

Post by colomon »

I've been a Perl user since 1994 or so, using it for an endless variety of small scripts to aid my $work and computer use in general. Since 2010 or so the vast majority of new scripts I've written have been in Perl 6, and I've ported a few of the older ones rather than try to make extensive modifications in my old Perl 6 code.

My biggest Perl 6 project (much bigger than anything I ever tried in Perl 4/5) is the ABC module [1]. This provides a grammar for parsing ABC music notation [2], a set of classes for representing ABC data, and some scripts built using it. The one I use the most is abc2ly, which translates ABC files to Lilypond format [3] for producing beautiful sheet music [4].

The other tool of mine I use routinely is TagTools [5]. There's nothing really fancy there, just a bunch of simple scripts which use Perl 6's Audio::Taglib::Simple module to work with the tags on MP3 files. But they were easy to write, come in handy for working with MP3s, and are easy to modify for odd cases.

Recently I've done a couple of scripts which rely on Inline::Python. The latest is wunderlist.pl, which I have installed in cron to update my Wunderlist to-do list every day. There is (to the best of my knowledge) no Perl6 module for working with the Wunderlist API, but there is a Python module, wunderpy2. There is a bit of boilerplate glue code there (lines 16-21 of the script) but once that's done using the Python module is almost indistinguishable from working with normal Perl 6. (Of course, if you're fluent in Python this maybe isn't such a big deal for you, but I don't know more than a tiny bit of Python, and Inline::Python lets me effectively use Python modules from the comfortable-to-me world of Perl 6.)

[1] https://github.com/colomon/ABC (Note that as I write this, the README is about 4 years out of date.]

[2] http://abcnotation.com/

[3] http://lilypond.org/

[4] For instance, http://www.harmonyware.com/tunes/They_Sailed_From_Belfast.ht...

[5] https://github.com/colomon/TagTools

[6] https://gist.github.com/colomon/89a6e7b8bf7694aa42e83058bb43...

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

#137

Post by nsp »

melezhik wrote: post #82
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?

Fewer context shifts when working on features that require you to switch

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

#138

Post by labster »

b3h3moth wrote: post #67
logicallee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I followed the development of perl 6 for a bit. To put it mildly.

:-) "In the 20th century I followed the development of perl 6"

The mug hit the wall on 2000-07-18, which means there was less than 5 months of Perl 6 history in the 20th century. Apocalypse 1 didn't even come out until 2001.

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

#139

Post by colomon »

chubot wrote: post #53
perlgeek wrote: post #23

So far I've used it for several small tools, including some that refactored code for other, larger projects. Grammars really make that pleasant.

Are any of those open source? I'd like to see grammars used in "real" code, not just examples.

Real grammar [1], regularly used by me, at least. It may not be the best way of doing things today, it was written three or four Perl 6 compilers ago. But it works on the latest Rakudo release.

[1] https://github.com/colomon/ABC/blob/master/lib/ABC/Grammar.p...

Edited to add: I think originally based it on https://web.archive.org/web/20120201072612/http://www.norbec...

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

#140

Post by segmondy »

cestith wrote: post #114
raiph wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oh, I thought that was the Prolog curse.
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