Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 424 posts

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#131

Post by orev »

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.

Please investigate local::lib.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#132

Post by Grinnz »

nocman wrote: post #118
coldpie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In practice (from a rough survey of CPAN code and Perl code in the wild I've looked at), people rarely use the English versions, and tend to memorize the few punctuation variables that are commonly used: $_, @_, $/, $], $$, $@, $!, $? (and note that some of these are out of familiarity with other languages) and ignore the rest unless needed for a specific problem.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#133

Post by ken »

mmaunder wrote: post #65
timdiggerm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but is it a good, useful programming language? In some ways, the long development timeline suggests a slower, more stable way of doing language changes that appeals a lot to me.

Since you had to ask, I'm guessing you don't use it either.

I don't use it yet, either. Why are you trying to make it sound like a new language needs instant adoption, or it's dead for all time? It's not going to expire if it takes a few years.

There are two programming languages that I learned in their first 5 years. They both ended up being languages I dislike. A language that takes time to mature and isn't the pop language of the week sounds terrific to me.

Good languages stay in use for decades. If I miss the first 5-10 years of a new programming language, either I'll skip its turbulent youth and still be around for most of its life, or it'll turn out to have been a flash-in-the-pan language and I'll have missed nothing.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#134

Post by earthboundkid »

jrumbut wrote: post #111
earthboundkid wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yes, God bless them for making old Perl thirty years ago and popularizing the hash map as a core data type, and God bless them for making new Perl and whatever it brings. But I don't actually want to use either old or new Perl. :-)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#135

Post by glofish »

dkarl wrote: post #70

Routinely I see in numerous online discussions that people refuse to even consider Perl 6 because they hate Perl. Or there are younger people who think of Perl as "their grandfather's language" (in much the same way people in my generation view COBOL). I am not a fan of Perl, but this feels tragic to me. Perl was so radically different. I remember being on Perlmonks way back in the day, and someone would post a quest…

You are not alone feeling that. Check out to paper titled "93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs"

https://famicol.in/sigbovik/

"In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?"

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#136

Post by eCa »

mkozlows wrote: post #51
roryrjb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

And regarding 2): Signatures have been in core for several years now, you just need to turn it on. And for back-compat reasons it’s uncommon in CPAN distributed code.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#137

Post by DonHopkins »

nocman wrote: post #118
coldpie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet you have to know both versions of them all, and be able to recognize and understand both kinds when reading other people's code.

How does it improve the language to be so top-heavy and chock-full of obscure unreadable arbitrary syntax, 95% of which nobody every uses, but that everyone still needs to memorize and understand in order to read?

That's exactly why Perl's philosophy of TMTOWTDI is intellectually bankrupt, and encourages write-only "creative snowflake" Perl code that's an inscrutable, unreadable, unmaintainable nightmare.

The language isn't any better for having $" as a shortcut for $LIST_SEPARATOR (or $LIST_SEPARATOR as a mnemonic for $", depending on how you look at it), because now you have to learn twice as many things, and all that duplicated effort and mental stress and syntactic surface area doesn't make it any more powerful or easy to use, has absolutely no tangible benefits, only pointless costs, and makes it twice as hard to learn and read and maintain Perl code.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#138

Post by jlv2 »

Grinnz wrote: post #100
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.)

1. Carton 2. Function::Parameters, experimental core signatures

Why, after 20 years, are signatures still experimental?

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#139

Post by mcdermott »

Perl 6 was a huge mistake; it's a different language and should have never had the same name. I support renaming it so we can all forget about it and have Perl 7 be a direct, mostly backwards compatible descendant of Perl 5 with feature enhancements. This whole Perl 6 nonsense was the reason I jumped to Python many years ago.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#140

Post by nightcracker »

_pmf_ wrote: post #34
roryrjb wrote: post #4

Perl 6 is probably a great language, I'm not very interested in it, for the reasons someone might pick it, I'd probably pick a different language; of course not for any logical reasons, but still. Perl 5 on the other hand is still a great language for lots of reasons. I hope Perl 6 is renamed and Perl 5 will become Perl again and it will be reinvigorated and more people will consider it again. Don't get me wrong, I d…

> Perl 6 is probably a great language, Does it also have the unparseability problem[0] of Perl 5? That's a deal breaker for a lot of tooling. [0] https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393

Parsing C++ is also undecidable.
Post reply on HN