Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?
If you would have actually read the blog post, you would have seen a "Rakudo Perl 6 in production" section in it.
Perl 6 Optimism
51–60 of 243 posts
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#52Earlier 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.
Clarification: Decided by the Perl 6 devs who want to keep the name and don't seem to care about the damage that decision does to Perl 5
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Performance has improved a lot since the initial release: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/day-16-%F0%9F%8...
Performance improved a lot but it's still very bad. e.g. there is some csv-game[1] where there is perl6 code that used to take 16 minutes but now 'only' takes 5 minutes. perl5 completes the task in [1] https://bitbucket.org/ewanhiggs/csv-game/src/9604dc176b6303e...
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#54Another 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…
Why? Open source developers can work on whatever they want.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#55I 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.
Because parrot development was mismanaged and ran into ground. Similar to perl5 management in the last 15 years.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#56Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to Perl, the overall under-use of special characters and the forced indentation make it objectively more readable; there is a reason it's often compared to pseudocode. Age of release is a meaningless metric, btw. For starters, what Python was in 1991 is very different from what it was in the early 2000s, when it reached critical mass. Its modernity is measurable by the influence it had on most languages desi…
Special characters, clear visual markers of scope etc. that Python lacks is part of the appeal of Perl to me. I feel like a dyslectic when I read Python (projects of significant size) due to it being much less visually helpful and that the idea of simplicity falls apart when the problems are not trivial and when multiple devs have touched the code over multiple years. YMMV of course but that is why your POV is not ob…
The visual marker of scope is there and it's massive: indentation.
You can write bad code in every syntax, but when a language carries jokes about being "write-only" and the other has a reputation for being anal about indentation (the single most helpful scope-marker in any syntax), I don't think you can argue about objectivity when discussing readability.
This said, I'd like to see scientific comparisons, which are lacking. Some studies suggest terse languages using more special characters are more readable to experienced programmers than ones with simpler syntax, which seems to match your experience. That might well be true; but when applied to the real world, this still means than only a minority will ever prefer that style over a simpler one. As the number of coders naturally rises, this will only become more and more true over time.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#58how would one describe Perl 6 type system?
Is it dynamically typed, optionally typed, statically typed?
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#59I'm still wondering why they use non ASCII characters for operators.
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.
Well, this way you will have 2 versions of code in the wild, ascii and non-ascii. We will need to memorize both, which makes it harder to learn, and also having 2 versions of syntax that you run into puts unnecessary mental strain on a developer having to switch between contexts. Perl's motto was always "There's more than one way to do it", but IMHO it was also the root of many of its weaknesses. It just makes code more complicated to understand, and this is one way to make it even worse (otherwise I love what they did with Perl6).
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#60I 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.
Honestly? Because Perl 5 was ‘good enough’ and widely installed, and then critical mass moved on to python and JavaScript (which both then developed their own version skew issues).
you mean php? :)