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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#161

Post by 6thaccount2 »

petre wrote: post #127
6thaccount2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lizormato and some other folks have put in hundreds of performance fixes...I think these things just take time. The language might have been in development and design since the 90's, but it only just got to 1.0 or a "stable release" in 2017 I think. I'm surprised Larry Wall hasn't written a Perl6 book yet. Plenty of other authors have, but I was really looking forward to something from him or Damien Conway.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#162

Post by perigrin »

jschwartzi wrote: post #75
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'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 t…

While it's true in human language that idiomatic expressions are a barrier to learners, they are also a means of enhancing communication between experienced users of the language. Take Jargon for example, I've not got deep experience in functional programming, category theory, or discrete mathematics (really anything much higher than college stats), so the phrase "constrain the input domain of functions" set me scratching my head a little. I'm still not exactly sure what you meant by it.

However, it's one of those phrases that I'm sure is immediately clear to your intended audience. One who has experience and understands that monads are simply endofuctors that map between two category spaces (I think I got that right, and if I didn't the main point was illustrated anyway). As a person gains experience their language usage become much more intentional and expressive. Idiomatic language is really only this expression of experience and an effort to communicate the full context and nuance as succinctly as possible.

The best Perl developers I know understand this and what you see as praise for arcane-ness is usually in my opinion just embracing the idea that jargon and idiomatic language is inescapable, and should be just another tool in the toolbox for expressive writing.

Also Perl does some weird shit, and sometimes you gotta hack around that.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#163

Post by hitekker »

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.)…

3 is a common anti-pattern among software systems without clear leadership. Absent a steady, guiding hand, developers behind a component of a system are forced to set their own direction.

Unfortunately, that direction stems from their motivation which is easily tainted by group ego. Maybe the developers feel like they're not getting the attention they deserve, maybe they have a big idea they want to solve and their tool is tangentially related. Or maybe they know exactly what to do, and the "other" people in the system do not.

Whatever the rationalization is, it's enough to transmute their original purpose into a larger mission that everyone in their little silo agrees with, and that gradually diverges them from the rest of the system.

"We're necessary and therefore we're important... more important than the system we were built for!"

Eventually, a new name springs forth to signal their existence or even assert their dominance over the system to which they belong.

The kind of thinking that plagued ParrotVM:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358646

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#164

Post by btilly »

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…

I remember those days. As someone who instantly could explain it, I was sometimes lazy, but I just assumed that most of the people knew and were similarly lazy.

Mind you at one point I was also the #2 poster on perlmonks...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#165

Post by pvaldes »

wombatpm wrote: post #96

I learned Perl4 in grad school and it was a life changing tool to automate my analysis workflow. With it I was able to script complex solutions that drove stepper drivers and CCD cameras on a microscope for data and image collection. I stayed through the Perl5 change over and thought it was good. Then I tried OO programming. And cried. And read that Perl 6 would make it better. But I needed something now, on a window…

> With it I was able to script complex solutions that drove stepper drivers and CCD cameras on a microscope for data and image collection.

Can fall to mention that this sounds extremely sexy...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#166

Post by mmcclimon »

rubinelli wrote: post #150
bmn__ wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

From the Perl 5.30 documentation: > WARNING: Subroutine signatures are experimental. The feature may be modified or removed in future versions of Perl. https://metacpan.org/pod/perlsub

It's true that they're experimental, but it's extremely unlikely they'll be removed. The only reason they weren't stable in the most recent version of perl is because of some interactions with subroutine attributes (specifically, :lvalue) which needed some tweaking. We use them everywhere at Fastmail and they're great.

Which is to say: a lot of the reason they're still experimental is because Perl's commitment to backward compatibility. Other languages might have said "oh well," but Perl 5 said "oh, an unintended consequence that might break real uses in the wild; we should wait another year."

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#167

Post by Grinnz »

pvaldes wrote: post #158
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 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.

This would be a pretty difficult change. Aside from backwards incompatibility, module names are both filesystem lookups and package stash lookups, and in most cases both of those are case sensitive, and it's entirely possible for valid programs to use two modules that only differ in case - at best I could see a warning that searches for a "did you mean?" but that sounds slow.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#168

Post by laumars »

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.)…

> 3. 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.

I'm surprised by this comment because this is how pretty much every language works. C++ has specs and different compilers with different names and has done for decades. As does C, Python, Perl 5, Javascript, PHP, Lua, LISP, LOGO, BASIC, Pascal, SQL and your own example of Java has different compilers/interpreters/VMs.

Often even in languages where the "spec" is defined by a reference implementation, you still find people building their own compilers or VMs for different platforms or use cases.

It's really quite common to separate the language name (and specification version) from the compiler and runtime branding. In fact that used to be the norm back when target platforms differed wildly.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#169

Post by dmix »

I've got to agree Raku is way better than Cameila.

Although I understand why the female developer couple would want a female name. It just doesn't sound like a programming language and shorter the better (nothing beats Ruby).

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#170

Post by chucksmash »

empath75 wrote: post #92
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 pretty easy to upgrade most code from python 2 to 3 and a lot of code just runs as is. The reason the upgrade path was so slow, imo, is that even a reasonably small amount of work is still work, and for a lot of people, the benefits didn’t justify spending any time at all rewriting software that already worked.

After the initial round of "useful PyPI packages don't support Python 3 though, I can't migrate", that "I know 3.x is different and I'll have to read up on the differences....later" was absolutely the biggest blocker for adoption imo.

I know proficient Python programmers who were starting projects from scratch in 2017 and didn't want to use Python 3.x because they were in a hurry, worried that they didn't know how to write Python 3.x in a timely manner because they hadn't invested the time to learn it. Lots and lots of people just knew it was a known unknown for them, had no idea of the magnitude of the effort required to switch (tiny for new projects! tiiiny) and just put "look into this" somewhere deep on their backlog.

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