Live data from Hacker News

Perl 6 Optimism

p6weekly.wordpress.com

181–190 of 243 posts

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

APL has used a huge set of non ASCII characters for more than 30 years in production by large companies.

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

True that J & K do, but Dyalog doesn't and is pretty modern in that it is still very actively developed...interfaces to Python/R, runs on Raspberry Pi, hooks into .NET, can run on GPU...etc.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed on the keyboard thing. Dyalog sells an APL keyboard, but it isn't ergonomic, which I need.

I think "/" is a good symbol for map as it is easy access.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#183

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

Perl 5? Off the top of my head: Deutsche Bank, Broadbean, Photobox, BBC, Booking.com, Net-A-Porter. I'm sure a more enthusiastic Perl user can provide a surfeit of examples.

All of FastMail is in Perl5 (minus the Cyrus parts, which are in C).

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#184

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 suppor…

> Better migration/transition from Perl 5

This is what the CPAN Butterfly Plan is all about. And after that the Butterfly Perl 5 Project.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#185

I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time. Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers! https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-p…

I applaud you for that, I feel like it would do good for most of the people here who are so quick to voice their opinion to actually try Perl6 out, as I get distinct feeling that majority probably haven't. I definitely feel the emotion here:

"current of frustration that Perl 6 isn’t more widely adopted. There’s a kind of righteous indignation that the language is very good — so dammit (I’m projecting), when will people start taking us seriously? "

despite not even being part of Perl 6 community in any way. So many are attacking it on such circumstantial, or even irrelevant, grounds instead of discussing the merits and failings of the language itself.

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me frustrated (of tech world); people, myself included, scared to jump to new things, or even try out them leading to strong herd mentality. I suspect it is because everything has such strong network effects these days. And of course HN is kinda the worst because the business angle; there is always the question about if this makes commercial sense, which I'll admit might not be the strongest aspect of Perl6.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#186
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What exactly is Python-like about the data-structures? What do they do that, say, Java's Maps and Lists don't do?

Slices, for one.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The IBM/Unicomp APL keyboard is a standard PS/2 PC/USB HID keyboard. Literally the only special thing about the IBM/Unicomp APL keyboards is what is printed on the keycaps (which you can buy separately https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/USAPLSET).

I don't understand this - how do people on Hacker News not realize that your keyboard does not determine your character encoding? You can easily remap your keys to whatever you want, have multiple layouts for human and computer programming languages, change the modifier and functions keys, whatever you want. All with the keyboard you already have; laptop, external, it doesn't matter.

Somehow multiple layouts are not a big deal for multi-lingual people, why is it so confusing for programmers?

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#188

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

A surprisingly huge amount of the Amazon.com codebase is Perl 5. The various back-ends are primarily in Java, but most front-end code is Perl/Mason.

Wow! Still?

As one of the primary maintainers of Mason for many years I enjoyed telling non-technical friends that they used my work every time they went to Amazon. But I'd kind of assumed that was no longer the case these days. Apparently I can keep telling them the same thing!

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#190

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

Perl 5? Off the top of my head: Deutsche Bank, Broadbean, Photobox, BBC, Booking.com, Net-A-Porter. I'm sure a more enthusiastic Perl user can provide a surfeit of examples.

NVIDIA, Shutterstock, Symantec, Amadeus IT Group, Bank of America
Post reply on HN