Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody's using P6 for legacy code.
What kind of sane person who would use Perl ( 6 or older ) on a new project nowdays.
Me, albeit a small project, it was really fun to work on; it was an interactive blog.
Why I’m Learning Perl 6
171–180 of 380 posts
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tcl is pretty old. A lot of the territory it covered well is now better covered by other things. One of its great strengths was being extensible. It's pretty easy to bake some functionality into Tcl and provide a new shell with it. This is what expect ( http://expect.sourceforge.net/ ) is, for instance. Another early advantage of Tcl was Tk, which provided Tcl extended with GUI stuff. Tk was cross-platform and establ…
Old is relative. There is a good core dev community and recent development is promising. It's interesting you mention Lua because that is a language I picked up when looking to move from Tcl at some point in the last 8 years. I decided rather quickly against that. The reason is the swig bindings for Tcl are sufficient to generate decent package cores for just about anything I care to extend and I can optimize later.
Old is relative, but there aren't many alternatives to Tcl that are older.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ehh... I don't really understand the impulse to "call out" downvotes, or ask people to explain why they're downvoting something that you wrote or agree with. It's probably just my age, as I started out online when most discussion forums lacked explicit voting mechanisms. Before social media came along, and "gamified" human conversation. Maybe it helps police trolls, but at the cost of encouraging group-think and exce…
Ehh... I don't really understand the impulse to "call out" downvotes, or ask people to explain why they're downvoting something that you wrote or agree with. Sometimes there is some really weird voting dynamic here and it would be interesting to know what goes on. For a lack of a better word you can call it intellectual curiosity or something.
I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable comment more than a half hour or so old greyed out. But I often see highly-voted comment with an old greyed-out reply saying "why is this being downvoted". All that's happening is that the sample size of votes is too small early on to be meaningful.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every major language, or at least the ones that matter for backend development, has support for thread multiplexing / coroutines / fibers, whatever. M:N threading is not, from a developer perspective, the same thing as coroutines/fibers. Coroutines are lower-level; it's possible to build something like M:N threading on top of coroutines, but it means doing a lot of work that's already done for you in a language tha…
That's kind of the problem when the author uses meaningless words like "WEB SCALE", we don't really know what it means exactly. If it's about serving a great number of concurrent connections, I'm not sure why M:N is the only way to go.
> That's kind of the problem when the author uses meaningless words like "WEB SCALE", we don't really know what it means exactly.
When the author (as is the case here with M:N threading) identifies the specific feature of interest, we do know exactly what it means, independently of whether they also reference something less precise.
> If it's about serving a great number of concurrent connections, I'm not sure why M:N is the only way to go.
If you want to posit an argument challenging the idea that M:N threading is an advantage, that's a different thing that disagreeing with the authors contention that choices are fairly limited if you want a language with language-level integration of M:N threading.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#175Maybe it's because I'm old, but I don't see the appeal of M:N multiplexing in a programming language (i.e. 'green threads' or some other user-level context switching) For long-running tasks, if they are I/O bound you can use non-blocking I/O and event loops. If they are CPU bound, then use threads or separate processes. The two techniques can be combined to scale well across multiple cores. The OS is designed to sche…
> For long-running tasks, if they are I/O bound you can use non-blocking I/O and event loops. If they are CPU bound, then use threads or separate processes. The two techniques can be combined to scale well across multiple cores. That combining is what M:N threading is. Green threads are application level threads. "threads" are OS level threads. M:N threading is the ability to take M application level ("green") thread…
My point is that 'green threads/application level threading' is, IMO, not very useful in a language. As you say, it's the bit where putting them on actual threads is a win. A language that does its own green threads or co-operative multitasking is trying to do the kernel's job, and it will never be as good.
It's at the purported 'web scale' in the article (I'm guessing this means lots of tasks, or lots of work) that green threads least useful, because you know there that the workload will be big enough to keep all CPU cores busy, and multi-threading/multi-process is always going to be a win. Adding green threading to an already maxed out computer is just extra overhead for no benefit.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#176I hate perl6. I hate it because I tried to get involved in the project early on, and it led me down the Haskell rathole. I don't know what Haskell looks like today, but a decade or more ago it was the hardest language to pick up that I had ever experienced. It was as if I had a solid background in latin languages and I was trying to pick up Chinese based on a handful of tutorials written by a tourist on the back of a…
I looked quickly through the slides and saw that perl has now grammar build in the language... Truly an interesting feature
Is the language itself a good place for parsing/grammar handling?
I could not even find in the standard documentation which kind of parsers it supports, is it LR(k)? LL(k)? Any CFG? What parsing method does it use: recursive descent, shift-reduce, something more general like CYK/Earley algorithms? How does it handle ambiguities?
It turns out that `grammar` keyword generates recursive descent parsers and anything even a bit fancier still requires a dedicated parsing library.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Old is relative. There is a good core dev community and recent development is promising. It's interesting you mention Lua because that is a language I picked up when looking to move from Tcl at some point in the last 8 years. I decided rather quickly against that. The reason is the swig bindings for Tcl are sufficient to generate decent package cores for just about anything I care to extend and I can optimize later.
Old is relative, but there aren't many alternatives to Tcl that are older.
Good point.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#178Perl 6 is indeed fun - it's even optimised for it [1]!
I'm enjoying using it for command-line tools and web applications - it's expressive and scales with the problem space.
1. https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/perl-6-christma...
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#179Best argument to use Perl 6 is that it's fun. Like really fun. Whatever language you are using is boring. Perl 6 is just damn fun. It's like your favorite language but with dollar signs, and funner.
Perl5 is also fun. Until you have to work with others' people code, or even your own older code.
Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6
#180I hate perl6. I hate it because I tried to get involved in the project early on, and it led me down the Haskell rathole. I don't know what Haskell looks like today, but a decade or more ago it was the hardest language to pick up that I had ever experienced. It was as if I had a solid background in latin languages and I was trying to pick up Chinese based on a handful of tutorials written by a tourist on the back of a…
FWIW, I, too, have tried learning Haskell and ended up banging my head against the wall over and over. With Lisp, I eventually "got it", but Haskell has evaded my attempts at understanding it with impressive stubbornness[1]. Disclaimer: I do not hate Haskell, I just don't "get it". If you love the language, fine, have as much fun with it as you possibly can. I for one have given up, at least for now. Maybe I'll try a…
Haskell's rough to learn because it hits you with purity, category theory inspired typeclasses, and laziness all at once. It's natural that people struggle with this (I sure did).
If you feel like trying a pure language again someday you could consider PureScript (which just has the first 2 things above) or Elm (which just has the 1st). If you do try I'd like to hear how it goes, email in profile.