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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#171

Post by AnimalMuppet »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #110
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.

Dead, regarding Perl 6, is an interesting thing. It doesn't mean "no developers or support" because that's at least as true of newly invented languages that HN loves to get excited about. CPAN is a thing and has been for decades. It doesn't mean "doesn't work, not delivered yet" because there it is. It doesn't mean "no exciting features" because that's not true either. It seems to be more of a condemnation than a des…

"There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead." - Miracle Max

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#172

Post by Qcombinator »

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…

As just another Perl hacker, your "not real Perl" made me laugh. And no, let me reassure you that that snippet of line-noise is not, in fact, syntactically valid Perl after all.

...you have to transpose a couple of characters for that:

  cat nocarrier.pl
  !$#foo->_%[]
  
  perl -c nocarrier.pl
  nocarrier.pl syntax OK
(And yes, that genuinely does make me love Perl a tiny bit more. I guess you and I are just different that way, and that's OK.)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

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 coyness around whether it's "done" or not.

There's no coyness; the language spec and implementations are both actively developed, and it's a spec-first design, so Rakudo is sometimes incomplete with regard to the most-recent spec, but Rakudo is and for some time been a “production-ready, stable” implementation of Perl 6.

The language has been consistently described as stable since the “Christmas” release, Perl 6.c, on 25 December 2015, though it took a bit longer before Rakudo had a production-ready 6.c implementation; the current (and currently supported in Rakudo) spec is 6.d, released last year.

> Yes, it has a VM.

Several, in fact. (More if you count defunct historical ones like Parrot.)

> But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things?

Because they are: ParrotVM is a (AFAIK) essentially dead multilanguage VM that Rakudo used to support; Rakudo currently has a MoarVM backend, and a JVM backend, and IIRC there is a non-production-ready JS backend that is available separately.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#175

Post by rootusrootus »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
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 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

That's not really a great comparison. There is one single organization that both defines what python is and implements a compiler/interpreter for it, and that is all you would ever need to know to use it. No ambiguity.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#176

Post by rootusrootus »

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."

The language geek part of me loves Perl. The business part of me would never let it be used for production code. Too much business risk to tolerate.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#177

Post by TheRealPomax »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #110
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.

Dead, regarding Perl 6, is an interesting thing. It doesn't mean "no developers or support" because that's at least as true of newly invented languages that HN loves to get excited about. CPAN is a thing and has been for decades. It doesn't mean "doesn't work, not delivered yet" because there it is. It doesn't mean "no exciting features" because that's not true either. It seems to be more of a condemnation than a des…

It's usually more indicative of a language that's found in existing codebases, but is no longer used to start new ones. If you join a team and someone in that team actually knows Perl, that's highly unusual these days.

It's the same kind of "dead" as Latin: lots of folks actively use it, but meeting someone that does is pretty dang unusual unless you work for the Catholic church, in which case "everyone still uses it, what's dead about it?"

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#178

Post by penagwin »

nindalf wrote: post #143
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current state of Perl 5 for Python fans: ---- Perl 5: I'm not dead! TIOBE: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead! Internet: Yes he is. Perl 5: I'm not! TIOBE: 'E isn't? Internet: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill... Perl 5: I'm getting better! Internet: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment. TIOBE: I can't take 'im off like that! It's against regulations! Perl 5: I don't want to go off the chart.... Interne…

TIOBE is not a relevant barometer, it's just the number of searches and hence a noisy metric. Look at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ . It indicates that the popularity of C and Java halved between 2016 and 2018 and then made a dramatic recovery, doubling in less than a year. It would be absurd to suggest that there was a real world change to the usage/popularity of these two languages corresponding to this. A bet…

Even then I'm surprised to see Lua fall off the table, and Go's stagnation seems kinda odd.

Given how much lua is used as an embedded language in Games, Databases, Servers, etc. I feel I've only seen it's usage increase.

Go I can see as "appearing more popular then it is due to HN" but even then I feel like clis/networking tools have been using Go more and more.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#179

Post by condercet »

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.)…

This is a good list. The default user experience for Perl 6 needs to be dramatically improved.

Developer ergonomics matter! Yes, when you run 'python' you get cpython, and Java is probably hotspot vm or openjdk or something (but Java is not a good example of developer ergonomics).

Rust is one of the best examples here -- adoption is being driven by the ease-of-use of the entire toolchain, including the package manager and things as small as human readable compiler errors.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#180

Post by marcosdumay »

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,…

In my experience, I never got positional parameters to reliably work on Perl5. They were always buggy and would break with completely unrelated changes.

On Perl6 those are officially supported, so I imagine they work.

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