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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#121

Post by jasonjayr »

ricardobeat wrote: post #113
jasonjayr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing that the existing collection of modules on CPAN is languishing, but specific point is that the infrastructure behind CPAN + module distribution is unparalleled by anything I've seen elsewhere.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#123

Post by kbenson »

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.)…

> The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. 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." This wifty "no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you're running is Rakudo and Parrot" distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.

The reason the implementation is named (Rakudo), is because there's a spec, and originally there were a few people making implementations. There was good effort from individuals on C and C# versions that were more monolithic, and Rakudo was where most the community work went since it was designed in a way to be more cross platform (it's mostly implemented in the minimal NQP languages, which is "not-quite perl". It's a much easier thing to port to a VM, and then you get like 90% of the language features already designed and working).

The reason the VM is noted is because it changed a couple of times. Bringing the VM name into it lets people know that if it's different, maybe it will have fixed their main performance complaints. To my knowledge, they haven't used parrot in a decade or so, and there's actually some bad blood between the VM and Perl 6/Rakudo (which had different teams, another reason to brand with both.

So, Perl 6 is the standard. There have been multiple implementations to varying degrees of completeness, including but not limited to Rakudo, Pugs, and Niecza. Those implementations have generally targeted one or more VM targets, including Parrot, MoarVM, Java, .Net and custom VMs.

It may or may not have hurt adoption seeing this terminology, but it was there for a reason, because it denoted very large important aspects of what was going on behind the scenes, and in some cases doing otherwise could have worked against some relationships that were going on between projects.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#124

Post by invalidusernam3 »

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.…

Your view is pretty much exactly what they're trying to address with the name change. Check out the github issue https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/issues/81

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#125

Post by cannedslime »

I rarely see Perl in the wild today. Only companies that are too big too fail and too cheap to move on still clings on to Perl, the big "index" sites of the late 90'ies that somehow haven't been completely run into the ground by silicon valley giants like monster, facebook, linkedin etc.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#126

Post by DonHopkins »

jandrese wrote: post #98
DonHopkins wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "Perl is easy to learn because it borrows from other languages" argument is based on a very specific set of historical assumptions about which "other languages" everybody knows, and what associations they have with each punctuation character from different shells and languages and utilities and operating systems and config files circa 1987, that is just totally obsolete these days.

Bash still uses the same variable names. Are you saying nobody writes shell scripts anymore? Plus, you can always "use English;" if you want less cryptic names.

Bash didn't exist when Perl was invented in 1987. Bash was first released two years later in 1989. In 1987 there was the Bourne shell sh, and there was csh and derivatives like tcsh, and there was the Korn shell ksh and its derivatives, and they each had their own unique quirky menageries of subtly nuanced punctuation and syntax and variable names. And of course there was sed, and awk, and C, and even BASIC.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#127

Post by petre »

6thaccount2 wrote: post #89
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.…

If Perl6 is ever performant, I'll be dropping Python for a lot of Scripting uses. Perl6 is a big language, but has a lot of power and beauty.

Yeah too bad it's slow. I write Perl 5 code at work on a daily basis and really wanted to like Perl6. Too late, too slow.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#128

Post by bmn__ »

mkozlows wrote: post #68
CogitoCogito wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mentioned it in another comment, but a really obvious one is that functions in Perl don't have parameters. Every function just takes in a list, and can do whatever it wants with that list. This page gives a good overview of the situation: https://perl101.org/subroutines.html There's a kind of elegant flexibility to that, but it also makes it really hard to program reliably in the large, to build useful tooling, or…

> functions in Perl don't have parameters

Sorry, you are misinformed. That hasn't been true for a long time, see http://p3rl.org/Kavorka::Manual::Signatures

Other languages would kill for this kind of beyond-complete maximum overkill feature set.

> This page gives a good overview of the situation: https://perl101.org/subroutines.html

No, it doesn't. That page is not wrong, but incomplete and teaches the wrong stuff, wouldn't recommend. Instead see http://perl-tutorial.org/ for recommended tutorials.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#129

Post by joosters »

briffle wrote: post #119
joosters wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, but part of the problem is that CPAN is old, i.e. it's been around for years, so you can find very out-of-date documentation and advice on the web about how to install packages.

For example, if you find a page suggesting you run 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', and you try using that, you'll probably have a very bad time. Watch out for it trying to upgrade perl itself! There are newer, saner and nicer ways to access CPAN and install packages.

There's also possible conflicts between CPAN and your distribution's own packaged perl modules, but that's a common problem with any software you install yourself rather than through the distro's packaging scheme.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#130

Post by rurban »

0xffff2 wrote: post #78
mkozlows wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

It's not the last version. There are two latest versions of Perl, the perl5 variant, currently at 5.30.0, and the Perl 6 variant, but they use the Microsoft convention of years in the name.

Both have huge problems, perl5 being effectively dead and the most hated language amongst devs. (I'm still trying to save it via cperl though).

And Perl 6 interesting (I was the parrot backend maintainer, until they ditched it), but with no significant future.

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