Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?
I've got billion dollars in revenue running on a Perl 5 batch system.
Perl 6 Optimism
101–110 of 243 posts
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, old established language are in heavier use at large, established organizations. By that metric, COBOL is awesome.
There are real companies doing real work in newer languages like Swift and Go too. Perl 6 is a toy in comparison. Zoffix Znet I use it at $work for throw-away one-liners Awesome
Swift and Go are—dated from first stable release (and even giving them the benefit of counting Perl 6’s first stable spec as a stable release, but ISTR it took Rakudo a while to
catch the spec)—older, not newer, languages than Perl 6. Especially Go, which is nearly 10 years old.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#103Earlier 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…
> Its modernity is measurable by the influence it had on most languages designed after its success, like Go and Swift. So you are measuring "modernity" by legacy? Also, I don't see any Python influence in Go and from the brief exposure I've had to Swift, I'd say there isn't much influence there either. By your axiom, one could argue that C is a modern language.
> I don't see any Python influence in Go
Well, in Google's own words[1]: "Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++". Some go datastructures are very python-like. Coming from a big Python shop, it's unsurprising.
Chris Lattner mentions Python[2] as an influence among others. Swift's lists and dicts are very python-like. The way python deals with datastructures is one of its strong points, and it's clearly more modern than anything C-like.
Both Go and Swift are more restrictive than Python in many ways, mostly for performance reasons since they are built for specific needs, but the influence is there and openly admitted.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
One of the discussion was on the Perl blogs[1]. Most of the devs there are Perl 5 devs and they also decided against the name change. Perl 6 is the next iteration of Perl that has been redesigned from the ground up. Why should it bare a different name? Yes, the redesign took more than a decade and it's incompatible with Perl 5, but so is Python 3.6 compared to 2.7, albeit to a lesser extent. Even Perl 5.26 has change…
The most recent discussion I saw on this subject[1] makes it very clear that there isn't a consensus. If there is, it's in the "Perl 6 should rename" direction.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter...
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#105I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it. That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days? Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby…
Ruby has replaced Perl for me as that get-things-done scripting language on the system. It would be weird to go back especially now that Ruby has the right ecosystem and fairly good backwards compatibility.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#106Another 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…
I went to OScon in something like 2009 or 10 and someone working on the python interpreter they were gonna share with Perl got on stage and showed how the roadmap and their velocity wouldn’t have Perl 6 done until 2016.
This kind of crazy has been identified in the ecosystem for a while.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#107Perl Pessimism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl I have happy memories of Perl, and it started me on the path that led to a nice career of Python awesomeness. Thanks, Perl! That said, I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I'd ever consider using it again. I almost certainly wouldn't use it professionally because it's not exactly going to light up a resume. Yes, there are still Perl shops.…
Is there anything "suspicious" about using Perl other than it's not as popular as Python, according to Google Trends?
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The failure to admit it was going slowly was another killer. It will be released at Christmas, we just aren't telling you which one. After a few years of hoping, I gave up and am in the world of Python and Django. Its a shame as Perl feels like a more powerful / expressive language than Python.
This. Being "forced to use Python" sucks as a Perl developer.
Better than Java or VB by a long way. You can do most stuff just not as cryptically.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#109I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it. That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days? Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby…
Actually, I've been looking at Perl 6 and I think it's quite amazing. It's really the only language outside those I get paid to work with that I've considered doing a deep dive on. I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story. For example can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/lang…
> I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story.
I think far more likely is the people that have decided to dislike "Perl" are letting their prejudice leak.
Perl 5 is one of those languages that is hides complexity, partially by accident. I'm sure a lot of people have looked at Perl and been unable to figure out what's going on, and why the same function returns different values sometimes when called with the same arguments[1], and not known what to make of it because many things work exactly as expected, especially for people familiar with C. This can be confusing to people that thought they were getting a handle on the language. The conclusion then is either they are failing to understand the language, or the language sucks. I imagine one choice is easier on the ego than the other.
1: Context. People skimp on the reading or targeted learning and context bites them in the ass, even if it's fairly simple once known.
Re: Perl 6 Optimism
#110I 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…
> Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language
P5 and P6 have been explicitly different languages since day one[1]. As Larry Wall said, "We had to make almost everything [in Perl 5] ... backward compatible [with previous Perls] ... But now it’s the first chance to [break bug-for-bug syntactic and semantic compatibility] and ... I think we should [take the chance]."
> There’s no compatibility between the two.
None?
With an appropriately compiled perl 5 binary installed one can install regular Perl 5 modules from CPAN and use them as if they were Perl 6 modules:
use Some:Perl5::Module:from ;
> You can’t write a library that works in both versions
Even the large complex Perl 5 package Catalyst works in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 per the above.
> so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful
Per the above, the majority of CPAN just works 100% correctly out of the box.
> If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago.
P6ers thought about backward compatibility with Perl 5 from day one[1].