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Perl 6 Optimism

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Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#171

Post by donaldihunter »

crusso wrote: post #40

I 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…

The top three Perl 6 features that make me say "Wow, programming is fun" are grammars, concurrency and gradual typing. There are many other features that also make Perl 6 a joy to use.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#172

Post by ioddly »

kamaal wrote: post #124
bigbluedots wrote: post #37

Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?

Pretty much anybody using Unix is using Perl one way or the other. Its a bit like C. The language is so neatly integrated with the OS that its hard to beat it.

After reading this I couldn't think of anything I personally use that depends on perl, so I tried `pacman -Rs perl` to see what needed it. There's a surprising amount of packages that depend on it - openssl, git, automake...

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#173

Post by woolfy666 »

0x445442 wrote: post #64
crusso wrote: post #40

I 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…

Nice that you mention "deep dive". :-) https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/perl-6-deep...

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#174

Post by petre »

vgy7ujm wrote: post #41
crusso wrote: post #40

I 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…

Perl 5 is still as fun as ever. And newer things like Mojolicious keeps adding to the goodness.

Yes, Perl 5 is still fun, but I really like the chaining and FP in Perl 6, much like autobox but native. And native sets, rational number math instead of floating point math, the ability to use huge numbers without BigNum and lots of other awesoneness.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#176

Post by jnordwick »

sedachv wrote: post #165
jnordwick wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern APL derivatives (namely J and K) have ditched them though in favor of pure ascii.

The character set and font constraints of the early 1990s, when J (1990) and K (1993) were developed, no longer apply. APL symbols are part of Unicode. There is no technical advantage left to ASCII-only syntax for APL-derived languages.

> There is no technical advantage left to ASCII-only syntax for APL-derived languages.

Except for that minor technical advantage of actually being on a standard keyboard.

That said, I would love standard keyboards to get more symbols. I actally like using symbols instead of words for operators, when done in a consistent and logical fashion as J and K do and unlike Perl's disaster of a syntax.

Map and reduce (each and over in APL lingo, in K ' and /) should be a symbol.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#177

Post by petre »

kokey wrote: post #105
crusso wrote: post #40

I 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.

Ruby is both clean, expressive, has proper OO features and not it's not that alien from Perl. It feels a bit sluggish though, although to a lesser extent since 2.3. Perl 6 is slower for command line scripts anyway.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#178

Post by newen »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #98
newen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, literally every language does indentation. Python just does indentation badly by making it syntactically significant. Also. If you're going to come back to me with the argument that it forces people to use indentation, I've got some news for you. Literally everyone uses indentation. And if you somehow come across code written by the rare soul that doesn't use indentation, all I've to do is select the entire code…

> everyone uses indentation. Yes, if you don’t you’re incompetent. If you do, the markers are then redundant. Mixed indentation hasn’t been allowed in years. Any good editor will show mixed indentation, guides, and indent properly with the tab key, get one. Sounds like your knowledge of Python is about a decade behind. Not to mention those were nonissues from my experience even back in the day.

These issues are only there because python has significant whitespace. These issues should not have been there in the first place.

Ideally, I shouldn't need to use an editor geared specifically for python code to copy-paste some python code and run it. I have had no issues with the majority of other languages when copy-pasting some code and reindenting. Only in python have I had issues with it. Even in elpy-mode in Emacs, I have had issues. Another is Jupyter/IPython, a widely used python IDE for data scientists, where this problem crops up all the time. So lay off with the superior attitude.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#179

Post by vgy7ujm »

I hope that the Perl 6 core devs take notice of this and other threads from the past days. Somehow I think that the efforts have not been directed enough at things that perhaps are not that exciting for them but that matters a lot for potential users.

Examples:

  - Better migration/transition from Perl 5
  - Performance and stability
  - Killer features and explaining these thoroughly
  - Best in class tooling, editor support, super easy deployment
I am sure there are efforts, but perhaps not enough to meet the demands?

I say this of course realizing that resources in an open source project are limited. But something has to happen to accelerate the usage.

Keep on writing more articles etc to spread information outside the P6 core dev echo chamber.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#180

Post by petre »

fnord123 wrote: post #32
yesbut wrote: post #10

Earlier 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...

Too bad there are is no P6 code on the benchmarks game[1]. Probably a good opportunity to learn P6.

https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org

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