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Perl 6 Optimism

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Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#21

Post by petre »

ionforce wrote: post #4
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.

There were numerous discussions about this and it was decided against it.

Eventually one would use Perl 5 from inside Perl 6 with the "use v5" statement.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#22

Post by pletnes »

cesarb wrote: post #15
yorwba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It's a neat way of showing off fundamental Unicode support, and AFAIK there are ASCII equivalents for all of them, in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever.

> in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever. Did you mean to type a black square there, or is my Android phone missing a font? In any case, this shows a potential issue with using Unicode characters for operators or identifiers: unless it's from a common Unicode block (like basic Greek letters), it might not be readable. It's not just writing that can be a problem.

I heard many times that perl is «write only». Unicode operators takes it to the next level.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#23

Post by vgy7ujm »

petre wrote: post #21
ionforce wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should have chosen a different name for the language.

There were numerous discussions about this and it was decided against it. Eventually one would use Perl 5 from inside Perl 6 with the "use v5" statement.

If this really had worked seamlessly it would be great. But that includes /usr/bin/perl working this way on every OS etc... with a clear&easy upgrade path for existing code.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#24

Post by yorwba »

cesarb wrote: post #15
yorwba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It's a neat way of showing off fundamental Unicode support, and AFAIK there are ASCII equivalents for all of them, in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever.

> in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever. Did you mean to type a black square there, or is my Android phone missing a font? In any case, this shows a potential issue with using Unicode characters for operators or identifiers: unless it's from a common Unicode block (like basic Greek letters), it might not be readable. It's not just writing that can be a problem.

Android devices tend to lack a lot of Unicode characters for some reason. I typed the "rightwards two-headed triple dash arrow" (not used in Perl AFAIK, I just find the name funny for some reason) and it doesn't show up on my Android either. Another commonly missing character is schwa (ə), which is used quite a lot in IPA transcriptions, and I've seen accented Greek characters missing as well, so it's not like only very rare characters are neglected.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#26

Post by perlgeek »

collyw wrote: post #19
yesbut wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 6 has ASCII versions of every unicode operator: https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii

Is there a key for it on my keyboard though?

Hey, we have docs for that :-) https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode#Entering_Unicode_Cod...

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#27

Post by yesbut »

collyw wrote: post #19
yesbut wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 6 has ASCII versions of every unicode operator: https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii

Is there a key for it on my keyboard though?

yes, all of the ASCII characters are standard on most keyboards.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#28

Post by toyg »

joosters wrote: post #17
simias wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wikipedi…

I agree, it definitely hurt mainline Perl development when Perl 6 was this promised great new thing. At least Perl 5 never got abandoned, and there is development and bugfixing still going on today. Perl 5 has a feeling of being 'complete' as a language. I guess this makes it unsexy and it'll never be the cutting edge where all the cool devs want to work, but it's rock solid stable and reliable. Now, if only Perl 5 c…

> I guess this makes it unsexy

Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#29

Post by melling »

cousin_it wrote: post #25

Another year, another chance for all involved to learn the important rationality skill of recognizing sunk costs and opportunity costs, and give up when giving up is the best option. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/

Perl 6 was announced in the year 2000. 18 years is a long time. It should be a case study for software developers.

I don’t know if they should give up. Haven’t looked at Perl 6 in about 5 years. The best thing the community could do would be to turn the language into the solution to a particular problem:

Web development, machine learning, etc

Sure, anyone could build everything from scratch, but that’s usually not a good idea.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#30

Post by vgy7ujm »

toyg wrote: post #28
joosters wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it definitely hurt mainline Perl development when Perl 6 was this promised great new thing. At least Perl 5 never got abandoned, and there is development and bugfixing still going on today. Perl 5 has a feeling of being 'complete' as a language. I guess this makes it unsexy and it'll never be the cutting edge where all the cool devs want to work, but it's rock solid stable and reliable. Now, if only Perl 5 c…

> I guess this makes it unsexy Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.

I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.
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