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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#111

Post by jrumbut »

earthboundkid wrote: post #88
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.)…

I would move 4 up to 2. Every time I read an article about how cool Perl 6, I see the clever bits of syntax and think "WTF? I might enjoy playing with that for fun, but no way in hell would I use that for work."

I think this is what I admire about Perl 6, though also it is why it wasn't released as the successor to Perl 5 10 years ago.

It has some genuinely ambitious features, some things that (as someone who barely dabbles in new languages) that I haven't seen before, or combinations I hadn't seen.

Something novel instead of the umpteenth iteration of "x with a better type system" or "x without that pesky type system".

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#113

Post by ricardobeat »

jasonjayr wrote: post #67
mkozlows wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

As an active perl5 programmer, what do you mean by (1)? To this day, I've seen package management systems for many languages, and none I've seen has been as good as CPAN in terms of (1) Consistent place for distribution + documentation (cpan.org/metacpan.org) (2) Automated testing on a wide variety of platform and configuration (cpantesters.org) (3) CPAN has as standard for declaring dependencies in packages, but a n…

I don’t know where you’ve been looking, but none of that is particularly interesting or new at this point.

I worked with Perl daily and find CPAN even more of a wasteland than NPM. The average package there hasn’t been updated in a decade and has ancient dependencies to match; takes months / years for clients to be written for new tech.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#114

Post by cesarb »

pjc50 wrote: post #40
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.

It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6. The same is also true of Python2/Python3, which is why that transition has also taken so long. The difference is they managed to do it without everyone abandoning Python2 for something else.

> It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6.

I vaguely remember that, when Perl 6 was first announced, the idea was that it would be able to run unmodified Perl 5 programs (and not only that, but it would also be able to mix Perl 5 and Perl 6 modules in the same program).

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#115

Post by dagenix »

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.…

There have been _many_ version updates to Perl over the last 20 years. By my count, at least around 12. The last update was just this may.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#116

Post by finchisko »

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.…

>And I don't care to hear these discussions about minutia related to it.

and yet, here you are :D

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#117

Post by chessturk »

windsurfer wrote: post #46
zzzcpan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ruby seems to be doing ok.

I agree, somehow we're not all writing everything in Rust yet. Maybe it's coming, but I doubt it.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#118

Post by nocman »

coldpie wrote: post #49
DonHopkins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps something onomatopoeic like "$#_@;\>&%}`[*~!^)"

As a non-perl programmer, the mnemonic descriptions in the perlvar manpage crack me up. They probably are useful and make sense to perl programmers, but from the outside, they look like parody.

I don't think you should place too much emphasis/concern/whatever on most of the special variables available in Perl 5. I would wager that most Perl programmers never use about 95% of them (that is, the short 2-3 character ones listed on that man page).

At the very least, I would guess, most Perl programmers almost never use 95% of them -- and many would choose (as the perlvar man page says) to 'use English;' -- and thus use the readable version. An example would be using $LIST_SEPARATOR instead of $" (which is what I would do).

I write Perl 5 code frequently, and that man page is chock full of short variable names I never use.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#119

Post by briffle »

joosters wrote: post #91
0xffff2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perl isn't dead. It's a perfectly good, stable language with excellent library support. It's just not sexy and new, so there's no buzz about it. Perl6, on the other hand, is effectively another language altogether, and I hope they rename it completely to stop the confusion.

I am not a developer, but a sysadmin, and I don't know much about perl since I haven't used it much in the last 15 years. But I do know that if you have to run commands for CPAN to install some packages your developer says are required, your in for a bad day.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#120

Post by Grinnz »

cesarb wrote: post #114
pjc50 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6. The same is also true of Python2/Python3, which is why that transition has also taken so long. The difference is they managed to do it without everyone abandoning Python2 for something else.

> It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6. I vaguely remember that, when Perl 6 was first announced, the idea was that it would be able to run unmodified Perl 5 programs (and not only that, but it would also be able to mix Perl 5 and Perl 6 modules in the same program).

The key word there being "was".

Note that you can mix the languages in the same program, but it's no different than the capability of such modules as Inline::C and Inline::Python in Perl, and doesn't actually involve natively implementing a Perl interpreter.

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