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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#71

Post by gwd »

Grue3 wrote: post #36

Raku is a good name (can be abbreviated to 楽 as a bonus). Camelia is too long and is already the name of the mascot. Ofun is terrible (nothing like a product implying it's "fun" by literally including "fun" in the name).

The author (and many comments here) make good cases for renaming; but other than, "Perl 5 is dead, long live Perl 6", what case is there to be made for keeping "Perl 6"?

Having written some terrible scripts in perl 20 years ago (and still occasionally using it as an awk++), I am interested somewhat to learn what Perl 6 is like. But honestly, Rust and Swift are both ahead of Perl 6 in the "interesting new languages to learn when I have some free time" queue (having picked up Go over the last few years).

(edit: spelling)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#72

Post by ailideex »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
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 why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. (EDIT: And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans). I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at leas…

> Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible.

It does have multiple compilers for java, at least javac and ecj (eclipse compiler for java) http://blog.deepakazad.com/2010/05/ecj-eclipse-java-compiler...

And if you consider groovy and scala and kotlin it has many more compilers.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#73

Post by DougBTX »

goto11 wrote: post #58
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.

Like PHP

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#74

Post by jerf »

DonHopkins wrote: post #50
jerf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by far the most important thing they could be doing right now. It should have been done 10-15 years ago, and is arguably the dominant remaining reason for why the work done on both Perls since Perl 6 has failed to payoff the way it should have. There is a certain contingent of developers who should have been all over Perl 6 and very excited about it. We should have been seeing the stream of "$COMMON_LIBRARY b…

I believe Perl 5's decline and Perl 6's failure to catch on is evidence of the failure of their common underlying TMTOWTDI philosophy, which encourages write-only "creative snowflake" Perl code that's an inscrutable, unreadable, unmaintainable nightmare. (The sigil-heavy line-noise syntax sure doesn't help, either.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to... http://wiki.c2.com/?ThereIsMoreThanOne…

So I basically agree with you & jschwartzi. But to expand or reinforce my original point, it is very clear there is a substantial contingent of programmers who do not. While of course in my own opinion, my own opinion is correct (duh), at a more global level, or maybe in a more academic sense, I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I've already flopped on that matter once in my career and I reserve the right to be convinced by another language that I'm wrong now, too.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#75

Post by jschwartzi »

jerf wrote: post #11
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

I'm not surprised that the language is dying. They seem to be spending time on things no one cares about and things that are inconsequential.

This is by far the most important thing they could be doing right now. It should have been done 10-15 years ago, and is arguably the dominant remaining reason for why the work done on both Perls since Perl 6 has failed to payoff the way it should have. There is a certain contingent of developers who should have been all over Perl 6 and very excited about it. We should have been seeing the stream of "$COMMON_LIBRARY b…

I've found over the past 6 years that anything nice about Perl is negated by how hard it is to think of the right way to do something from among the 30 different ways. And it makes it difficult to write maintainable code because there are no good ways to constrain the input domain of functions.

I also don't think it's a good thing that the language has idioms. In a human language idiomatic expressions are a barrier to learners, and it's the same with Perl. The context-sensitivity of expressions is also a huge barrier to maintainability because it's impossible to know from looking at the code what the acceptable contexts are for a variable. You basically have to keep track of the state of a variable separately if you want to avoid usage errors.

Finally, the fact that Perl users consider the arcane-ness of Perl to be a good thing is the last nail in the coffin for me.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#76

Post by hestefisk »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
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 why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. (EDIT: And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans). I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at leas…

IronPerl was a .Net implementation of Perl so one could compile to IL. Afair, adoption was sparse.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#77

Post by skykooler »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
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 why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. (EDIT: And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans). I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at leas…

> Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at least. Probably a few others.

...and IronPython, Cython, PyPy, PythonNet, MicroPython, probably plenty more I'm forgetting.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#78

Post by 0xffff2 »

mkozlows wrote: post #55
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.

I doubt it.

"Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features..." will be met with "Oh, you mean Perl 6? lol."

If Perl is dead, renaming the last version isn't going to change anything.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#79

Post by fnord123 »

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.…

>Taking that long for a single version update in a language is not reasonable.

PeRl 6 Is NoT aN uPgRaDe Of PeRl 5. It'S a SePaRaTe LaNgUaGe.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#80

Post by empath75 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #52
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.

My experience is that Perl scripts other people wrote are impossible to understand. It made me never want to touch it again. I was handed several unmaintained ten year old Perl scripts to update and in every case I just rewrote it in python just because Perl gave me a migraine looking at it.
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