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Perl 6 Optimism

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221–230 of 243 posts

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#221
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 6 seems to have one of the worst cases of the second system effect in modern history. It didn't help that Larry Wall got sick halfway through the development either. As a Perl 5 developer, I look at it and go "If I have to learn a new language I might as well make it a popular one like Python 3 or Rust."

Python - ok, but Rust? How many Rust jobs do you see posted on major job sites?

Python will get you a job today, but Rust may well be more valuable in the future. Or it may be a flash in the pan that never catches on in a big way. The future is hard to predict.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#222
post #83
post #52

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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…

> Yes, the redesign took more than a decade

Quite true! In fact, the redesign took more than a decade and a half (July 2000 to Dec 2015). A record worth breaking!

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#223
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one that moved to Python and don't want to look back. It is not that Python is easier read (I would say it is less noisy) but it is almost impossible to write your own "DSL" like you can do with Perl or Ruby. YMMV but for me this is what makes it easy to maintain: you just need to learn Python not the personal programming style of the previous developer.

If you have such a strong preference for Python isn't it fair to say that any version of Perl - 5 or 6 - wouldn't be right for you as Perl falls on the expressive end of the language spectrum like Ruby and Clojure? You could have left Perl for Python before Perl 6 was even invented.

Of course, the Perl 5/6 soap opera was not the reason for jumping the ship.

10 years ago RIA platforms were the rage (Silverlight, Flex). By this time I was working in operations but willing to switch career to software development. Finally the opportunity presented and I picked OpenLazlo and PHP/MySQL. Two weeks later it was clear that I would not be able to meet the deadline using this platform. I googled for something like "productive web frameworks" and the top entries were about Rails, followed by Django. I could not make Rails work on my local development environment but the the Django tutorial worked like a charm.

So the truth is that I started using Python more seriously because I was not smart enough to make through the Rails tutorial. But no complaints - Python/Django is paying my rent since then!

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#224
post #205

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My point is that you should be able to code python using Notepad but it is impossible to. Yeah, when multiple people complain of the same thing and you make up more and more complicated solutions for the problem, then you know where the problem lies. Also, you smell.

Yeah, using an editor is so complicated. Maybe programming isn’t for you.

There are many cases where it is. And your rudeness and devolution into pathetic statements like this is noted.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#225
post #219
post #218

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They are not invisible in any half-decent editor.

But in the majority of editors that actual people use (mainly, jupyter/ipython), they are invisible. Not to distract from my point though, which is that a good programming language should be easily editable from Notepad.

[deleted]

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Mason is great. Thanks for your work! They are phasing it out but very slowly. It'll probably be around forever on internal tools.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#227
post #219
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not invisible in any half-decent editor.

But in the majority of editors that actual people use (mainly, jupyter/ipython), they are invisible. Not to distract from my point though, which is that a good programming language should be easily editable from Notepad.

This is where your bias shows. You define this "majority of people" by looking at your niche - you must be in academia or big data. I can tell you that in my niche nobody knows what the hell jupyter even is, and they use real editors like PyCharm, emacs, vim and so on, where whitespace is never a problem.

> a good programming language should be easily editable from Notepad.

The '90s called, they want their notepad back. Please. Not even Windows users run Notepad, anybody with a minimum of knowledge will use Notepad++. And guess what, N++ has plenty of features to deal with whitespace.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Mason is great. Thanks for your work! They are phasing it out but very slowly. It'll probably be around forever on internal tools.

Cool, I'm glad it's still helping people. For the record, I was not the creator of the package. That was Jon Swartz.

I did a lot of work on it for quite a few years in the early 2000s and maintained it for quite some time after that.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#229
post #55

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Because parrot development was mismanaged and ran into ground. Similar to perl5 management in the last 15 years.

Is there any hope of seeing your cperl efforts in mainstream perl? Would you be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back?

You have to ask them. They are the ones refusing any changes and cooperation, and are still actively destructive. In parrot the destructive people eventually burned out, and I could fix much stuff, but the big changes from around 2.7, the calling convention and the jit and runloop removal was eventually too much.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#230
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because parrot development was mismanaged and ran into ground. Similar to perl5 management in the last 15 years.

Is there any hope of seeing your cperl efforts in mainstream perl? Would you be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back?

> be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back

It is essentially impossible to do so, as the problems are systemic and run extraordinarily deep.

Would you honestly consider any possibility of working on a "level" with people like this: https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2018/01/m...

So I can't fault rurban for walking away. The project still has merit. Its current leadership - none.

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