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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#191

Post by _pmf_ »

viraptor wrote: post #42
_pmf_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This specific problem is not a deal breaker in practice. You solve the problem by adding to the readme of the tool "If the arity of a function cannot be established, we assume no arguments and print an warning. Add {foobar} before the function to assume arguments. Sorry for inconvenience." No language tooling is perfect. We shouldn't expect that from Perl tooling either.

> No language tooling is perfect.

Java and C# tools are pretty close. But yeah, it's generally hard for dynamic languages.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#192

Post by davidw »

hitekker wrote: post #190
davidw wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No - I'm just saying that it objectively gained a lot of popularity because they did some things right, and then lost it again because they got some things wrong.

Of course part of that is technical, but part of 'marketing' is understanding what your users want and delivering it to them.

This article I wrote about Tcl a while back is what I'm talking about: https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#193

Post by markbnj »

jhanschoo wrote: post #17
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.

FWIW, C++ is a different language from C, and C code is more C++ compatible than Perl 5 is for Perl 6.

> FWIW, C++ is a different language from C

It's been 20 years so my information could be very much out of date, but at that time anyway I would not have said this statement was true. C++ then was a superset of C, and any C++ compiler was capable of compiling ANSI C.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#194

Post by hitekker »

jannotti wrote: post #182
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…

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

As per usual, the GP sees the matter from a purely technical perspective, which occludes the larger business insight that the top-level comment provides.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#197

Post by zzzcpan »

Qcombinator wrote: post #186
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 ambit…

> What other language does everything P6 does?

Why would any language do what Perl 6 does? Languages do what they need and typically do at least some things Perl 6 doesn't do and at least some things do better than Perl 6 does them. Sometimes such things are much more important to people than everything Perl 6 does.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#198

Post by Qcombinator »

_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

No, P6 was intended to fix as many Perl 5 problems as possible, and being eminently parseable was considered very important (and important in deciding to forsake backwards-compatibility, I believe). In fact, a key design-goal is having the language defined by a well-formed grammar that it actually uses to parse itself — and thus that can be used by tools such as editors to parse it just as easily.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#200

Post by xorcist »

mkozlows wrote: post #68
CogitoCogito wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years. I don't have any real experience with Perl, so could you maybe expand a little? I'm curious about what you think the limitations are.

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…

There is a certain elegance to bare lists, as any lisp programmer will probably agree with. It enables the programmer to build their own abstractions as they go.

That is also true for the overly simple object model of Perl 5, it is more like an OOP construction kit, which enables things like Moose which has for almost 15 years provided Perl 5 with a very flexible object model.

It would be very interesting to know if anybody knows of similar systems for other languages?

Large OO codebases can be downright nasty to navigate and while I have never had the opportunity to use something like Moose for large scale projects I imagine that's where it would shine.

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