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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#181

Post by dragonwriter »

cutler wrote: post #12

I don't get all this "Perl 6 is a different language" nonsense. It was created by Larry Wall and retains all the characteristics of Perl 5 whilst adding a lot of great stuff from other languages. Sadly, performance prevents it being taken seriously in production.

> It was created by Larry Wall and retains all the characteristics of Perl 5 whilst adding a lot of great stuff

Except, you know, rampant incompatible syntax. Being invented by the same person and having an overlap of desirable features doesn't make it the same language, in the same way that C# is not Delphi.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#182

Post by jannotti »

kbenson wrote: post #123
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 w…

You can tell that the parent post understands all that, right?

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#183

Post by spathi_fwiffo »

ailideex wrote: post #72
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…

> Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. It does have multiple compilers for java, at least javac and ecj (eclipse compiler for java) http://blog.deepakazad.com/2010/05/ecj-eclipse-java-compiler... And if you consider groovy and scala and kotlin it has many more compilers.

... and it also has Brand Names in abundance, even internally to java's core.

JustInTime, HotSpot, Swing, Beans, etc.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#184

Post by philwelch »

nabdab wrote: post #82
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.…

Perl6 is not “a single version update” of perl5. It’s an entirely new language.

So is Ruby. So is Python.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

mikl wrote: post #141

Until Perl6 is actually released, it doesn’t really matter what they call it. (yes, I know they have functional snapshot builds, but as long as there’s not a final "6.0" (or "1.0") release, expect most devs to steer clear of it. Few people (masochists, mostly) want to use an ‘experimental’ programming language for important work).

> Until Perl6 is actually released, it doesn’t really matter what they call it.

> (yes, I know they have functional snapshot builds, but as long as there’s not a final "6.0" (or "1.0") release, expect most devs to steer clear of it. Few people (masochists, mostly) want to use an ‘experimental’ programming language for important work).

The “1.0” for the Perl 6 spec (6.c, because reasons) was released in 2015; the stable implementation in Rakudo was a little later but years ago. Current Rakudo has a stable, production-ready implementation of last year's 6.d version of the language spec. So we’re well past the threshold you suggest.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#186

Post by Qcombinator »

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.…

>The world has moved on.

Except that it hasn't. What other language does everything P6 does? (Or even tries, let alone does it as well or better.) What language does "most" or "a lot" of it? To be honest, I would have expected that after a couple of decades, there would be other languages that stole a lot of P6's thunder, but if there is anything remotely comparable, I haven't heard of it.

P6 is an surprisingly ambitious project. (I think even surprisingly so to its creators.) Apparently it just takes this long to do something that big and powerful.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#187

Post by spiralx »

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…

> The analogy to natural language carried further into practice than Larry Wall could have dreamed.

Over the years I've seen this mantra repeated a million times but I've yet to have anyone actually explain what it means beyond a piece of marketing fluff. What actually is this analogy in concrete terms?

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#188

Post by davidw »

kbenson wrote: post #123
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 w…

> 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.

That sounds like a really solid foundation to build a business on...

I think if people are willing to look with an unbiased eye, there are a lot of software marketing lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Perl. It got a bunch of stuff right back in the day.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#189

Post by devit »

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.)…

Feels like the big blocker is that it seems to only be useful if you insist on a language that is Perl-like but also modern, but most Perl programmers probably moved to other languages already and don't care about whether their language is Perl-like, and the remaining ones are probably mostly maintaining Perl 5 codebases that they don't want to rewrite.

Ignoring the Perl angle, it's a language with a small ecosystem that doesn't seem to provide any groundbreaking advantage compared to existing languages, so no reason to adopt it.

In general, to become popular a new language needs to provide one of those:

1. A new groundbreaking and useful paradigm that cannot be added to existing popular language ecosystems without a total compatibility break (e.g. Rust)

2. Compatibility with an existing ecosystem and significant improvements (e.g. Kotlin)

3. Being the best among languages required by a platform or program (e.g. Swift, also JavaScript when introduced)

4. Have one of the best ecosystems for a specific niche (e.g. Ruby when Rails got popular)

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#190

Post by hitekker »

davidw wrote: post #188
kbenson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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. That sounds like a really solid foundation to build a business on... I think if people are willing to look with an unbiased eye, there…

Do you have some articles or reading that you'd recommend on Software Marketing vis-a-vis Perl?
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