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Perl 6 Optimism

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Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#2

Post by joosters »

I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code.

This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using python 2.x. In short, there’s no sensible upgrade path, Perl 5 & 6 are very much their own language.

If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago. Trying to hack in some Perl 5 style functions into it now seems futile...

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#4

Post by ionforce »

joosters wrote: post #2

I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using p…

Should have chosen a different name for the language.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#6

Post by zura »

joosters wrote: post #2

I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using p…

You can actually use Perl 5 and even Python modules from Perl 6: https://github.com/niner

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#7

Post by baybal2 »

I used perl when dinosaurs still roamed the land. Can somebody explain why it took so long for Perl 6? I read first p6/parrot vm textbook as a schoolboy more than a decade ago.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#8

Post by simias »

joosters wrote: post #2

I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using p…

Pretty much. I used to use Perl 5 a lot but I never considered using Perl 6 and eventually moved on from the Perl ecosystem altogether. The huge advantage of Perl ~10 years ago was the massive amount of CPAN packages but in the meantime python & friends mostly caught up in my experience.

Meanwhile the shiny new revolutionary Perl 6 took forever to release and when it finally did nobody cared anymore. Quoting Wikipedia:

>The design process for Perl 6 began in 2000. [...] on December 25, 2015, the first stable version of the specification was announced.

I can respect taking the time to do things right but when your development history resembles that of Duke Nukem Forever something is off. That in my opinion hurt Perl more than anything else, even more so than the lack of compatibility between Perl 5 and Perl 6. If Perl 6 had released in early-to-mid 2000 I think there would've been enough interest out there to bridge the gap. It would've been messy but it could've worked.

Instead Perl 5 felt a bit like a legacy language "while we wait for Perl 6 to be finished" and Perl 6 was nowhere to be found. And Perl went from the de-facto scripting language for un*x to people asking "Is Rakudo Perl 6 used in production?".

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