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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#51

Post by mkozlows »

roryrjb wrote: post #35
mkozlows wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no saving Perl 5; it's a legacy language in legacy maintenance mode for good reason. Renaming Raku/Camelia could help that language quit being saddled with the perception that it's also legacy in the same way, though.

What good reason is that?

Off the top of my head:

1. CPAN was great 20 years ago, but it's a joke compared to modern dependency management systems.

2. Functions don't have explicit parameters, and still shift off of @_. (This can be kind of a catch-all for all the "things that are useful for scripts, but suck for programming in the large" design decisions in Perl 5, because I honestly don't remember all of them at this point.)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#52

Post by CogitoCogito »

mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

> but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.

I don't have any real experience with Perl, so could you maybe expand a little? I'm curious about what you think the limitations are.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#53

Post by mmaunder »

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time.

Perl6 was promised. Then it never happened. It's now an almost quarter century later. The world has moved on. Taking that long for a single version update in a language is not reasonable. I loved Perl. I still love Perl5. But I've moved on and have 100% blocked Perl6 from my psyche and list of expectations. No one I know uses it. I am not excited by it. I dont need it. And I don't care to hear these discussions about minutia related to it. It's a debacle and a case study in the failure of what was a beautifully ugly practical performant language.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#55

Post by mkozlows »

mmaunder wrote: post #53

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time. Perl6 was promised.…

... which is the whole point of renaming it, right?

"Oh, it took too long to update Perl and now Perl is dead" is true.

"Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features, and excels at this particular type of problem" can also be true. But nobody can hear this message while they keep thinking about Perl.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#56

Post by patrickas »

zzzcpan wrote: post #26
cutler wrote: post #12

I don't get all this "Perl 6 is a different language" nonsense. It was created by Larry Wall and retains all the characteristics of Perl 5 whilst adding a lot of great stuff from other languages. Sadly, performance prevents it being taken seriously in production.

> performance prevents it being taken seriously in production. Performance is a big one. Not focusing on performance is like a strategic mistake for a programming language these days.

That is exactly what the main architect of the compiler has been working on for the past couple of years.

Performance has been enhanced by a few factors since it was released in 2015.

For a lots of things the next stable release (as soon as the latest round of optimization have been merged) will be on par with perl5 / ruby / python ...

The main slow thing remaining is Grammars which if I understand correctly are not available in those other languages to compare speed, but that is next on the road map for optimization.

Here is a recent talk about the state of perl6 performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNeu0wK92NE

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#57

Post by jschwartzi »

jefftk wrote: post #13

This makes a lot of sense. Renaming Perl 6 means: * Perl 5 can continue being "perl" and have a future. People with existing perl codebases won't think they're going to need to upgrade. * Camilia/Raku/etc can be considered on its own merits. The C/C++ analogy is a good one: when things are different enough you stop expecting everyone to "upgrade" and instead are making a different language.

Speaking as someone with an existing Perl codebase in an embedded Linux system, we were planning on replacing it with Lua anyway because that would shave a solid 20 MB off the image size with no downside.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#58

Post by goto11 »

DangerousPie wrote: post #29

As an outsider who hasn't written perl code in more than a decade this all makes a lot of sense to me. I think of Perl 5 as something "outdated" because I know that there is a language called Perl 6. When I think of Perl 6 I am not particularly interested in it because I assume it's more or less the same as the "old" Perl, which I don't use and didn't really like back in the day. Renaming Perl 6 to something else wou…

If Perl 6 is renamed, Perl 5 could skip to Perl 7 in the next version to avoid confusion.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#59

Post by lelf »

tyingq wrote: post #19
lelf wrote: post #9

> s/Perl/$other_language/g I’m somehow not sure Perl6 has anything to do with that. > because they're tired of waiting for Perl 6 But…for what exactly? It’s already stable enough for use.

Reasonable performance

It is.

Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5iVBlk7pdg&t=279m33s “Perl 6 Performance Update”

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#60

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

mkozlows wrote: post #31
DangerousPie wrote: post #29

As an outsider who hasn't written perl code in more than a decade this all makes a lot of sense to me. I think of Perl 5 as something "outdated" because I know that there is a language called Perl 6. When I think of Perl 6 I am not particularly interested in it because I assume it's more or less the same as the "old" Perl, which I don't use and didn't really like back in the day. Renaming Perl 6 to something else wou…

There's no saving Perl 5; it's a legacy language in legacy maintenance mode for good reason. Renaming Raku/Camelia could help that language quit being saddled with the perception that it's also legacy in the same way, though.

The current state of Perl 5 for Python fans:

----

Perl 5: I'm not dead!

TIOBE: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!

Internet: Yes he is.

Perl 5: I'm not!

TIOBE: 'E isn't?

Internet: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...

Perl 5: I'm getting better!

Internet: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

TIOBE: I can't take 'im off like that! It's against regulations!

Perl 5: I don't want to go off the chart....

Internet: Oh, don't be such a baby.

TIOBE: I can't take 'im off....

Perl 5: I feel fine!

Internet: Well, do us a favor...

TIOBE: I can't!

Internet: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long...

TIOBE: No, gotta get to Reddit, they lost nine today.

Internet: Well, when's your next round?

TIOBE: Next year.

Perl 5: I think I'll go for a walk....

Internet: You're not fooling anyone, you know-- (to TIOBE) Look, isn't there something you can do...?

Perl 5: I feel happy! I feel happy!

----

But seriously, Perl 5.30 just came out in May. It's not dead yet.

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