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

151–160 of 424 posts

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#151

Post by iosonofuturista »

bmn__ wrote: post #128
mkozlows wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

So, the first tutorial on the list that you recommend has this page for functions[0]. It's more or less the same as GP's link.

YOU are the one misinforming, it would seem. Granted, I don't work with perl (5, never tried 6) for about 15 years, but most criticism of it seems to align with my experiences back then.

[0] http://mvp.kablamo.org/basics/functions/

Edit: The second [1] also recomends the @_ method, and the third [2] the shift method. Did you even read your own links?

[1] https://perlmaven.com/subroutines-and-functions-in-perl [2] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl/ (search for subroutines)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#152

Post by DonHopkins »

Grinnz wrote: post #144
DonHopkins wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bankru…

Memorizing everything is not required, there is reference documentation. Learning the language would familiarize you with the important syntax, as with any language, and all languages have such oddities, they just appear in different forms.

No, all languages do not have such oddities. That's a false equivalence. And it doesn't excuse Perl's bad design or justify its intellectually bankrupt TMTOWTDI philosophy.

Python's philosophy of "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it" is diametrically opposed to TMTOWTDI, and Python's vastly more successful than Perl because it's much easier to learn, read, use and maintain. Can you name any schools teaching Perl as a first programming language, like so many teach Python?

Forcing you to look punctuation up in the reference documentation is even worse than having to memorize it. Pausing from reading code to look up punctuation in the manual slows you down by orders of magnitude, and knocks you out of the flow. Random punctuation is not easily memorizable or mnemonic or searchable or indexable.

You also have to have memorized the ASCII order of punctuation to index through the manual, which is different than how punctuation is arranged on the keyboard! Is a comma or underscore less than or greater than a double quote or back quote, and why should I care?

How exactly do double quotes imply "LIST_SEPARATOR"? Shouldn't it be $, because comma is the standard list separator, instead of $" which looks like it could be "STRING_DELIMITER", or does $, mean something completely different? And how am I supposed to remember all that? It's totally arbitrary, annoying, and off-putting.

Now tell me how Perl is any more powerful by having twice the number of ways necessary to express the every concept?

Perl pointlessly has twice as many inane pieces of syntax to memorize or look up, to do the same number of things. There is no upside to that, only cost. And that's one reason Perl is dead.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#153

Post by mempko »

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.…

What has changed in the programming world so much that Perl 6 (or raku, or whatever it will be called) is now irrelevant? Seems to me we still have the same problems we did when Perl 6 started. In fact, one of its graces, parallelism, no GIL, is an asset now with multi-core. Reactive programming is popular now which is built into perl 6. Functional programming is now more popular which is built into perl 6. Serving web requests and parsing json is popular now and that's super easy to do with perl 6.

Possibly the latest thing that perl 6 does not do (and most languages don't do) is heterogenous computing (GPU/CPU, etc). But perl 6 strength is that it can drop into a new language DSL inline without issue so if any language will just freely mix GPGPU and normal CPU compute in a nice way it could be perl 6. Wonder if anyone in the community is working on that...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#155

Post by zests »

I want to write some scripts that are _slightly_ too complicated for bash. Basically just implementing some simple scripts that have a couple options/args and I want to use another tool.

How good would perl 5/6 be for this?

If not perl, anything similar that's not python? I want to learn something new.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#157

Post by ben509 »

dragontamer wrote: post #87
mkozlows wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most people don't know or care. They just type "python" and Python happens. If they need to find another implementation, it's possible, but there's no question about what the default implementation is.

> Sure, but most people don't know or care. A lot of people care. It costs $3500 per server to run Zing Java. Every user of Zing cares enough to pay $3500. Everyone who has written an Android app cares about the distinction too. Dalvik has different quirks than regular Java. (EDIT: Oh boy, that shows how out of date I am. Apparently Android is now using Android Runtime instead of Dalvik....) > If they need to find an…

>> Sure, but most people don't know or care.

> A lot of people care.

Both of these claims are true, but yours is missing the point.

You grow a userbase by appealing to people who don't use or understand your product. People who are already invested to the point of spending $3500 for a custom VM aren't the ones you're trying to clarify things for by using consistent branding.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#158

Post by pvaldes »

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 would love to see a upgrade to cpan able to handle names converted to lowercase internally. To remind that you must write "use MymoDuleSQL" instead "use myModuLeSqL" can become pretty frustrating for my tired eyes.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#159

Post by Grinnz »

zests wrote: post #155

I want to write some scripts that are _slightly_ too complicated for bash. Basically just implementing some simple scripts that have a couple options/args and I want to use another tool. How good would perl 5/6 be for this? If not perl, anything similar that's not python? I want to learn something new.

"This would be annoying to write in bash" is a very popular use case for Perl (5).

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#160

Post by d0mine »

skykooler wrote: post #77
dragontamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are only two main Python languages: 2 and 3 (it is expected that Python 3.x runs Python 3.y code for x>y).

Python 2.x language has several implementations CPython (the reference implementation), Pypy, Jython, IronPython.

Python 3.x language also has several implementations CPython, Pypy

Cython understands Python but it is not Python (I don't know whether it is a strict superset).

MicroPython implements some subset of Python 3.4 (mostly)

Post reply on HN