231–240 of 424 posts
Perl 6 was a huge mistake; it's a different language and should have never had the same name. I support renaming it so we can all forget about it and have Perl 7 be a direct, mostly backwards compatible descendant of Perl 5 with feature enhancements. This whole Perl 6 nonsense was the reason I jumped to Python many years ago.
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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.
(To be clear: not because people aren't writing Perl, but because we tend to reflexively reject any technology that people are passionate about because "risk". But the risk of writing trash code that nobody ever could be passionate about is less visible. Also: I'm not saying there's an easy solution to this problem.)
Perl6 has been under development for over a decade at this point, and this equivocating statement is the best that can be said about performance? If the "work is clear, the goals are straightforward" and Perl 6 should easily outstrip Perl 5 on performance, then by gosh they should demonstrate that. Plenty of comments are mentioning slow performance. Not having used Perl 6 myself, I can't comment on it, but the fact that this seems to crop up a lot is really worrying. I've heard varying things - regex/grammar are slower than Perl5, startup time is really slow, etc.
And yes - I realize that technically the most popular compiler/VM combination Rakudo+MoarVM hasn't had that full decade of development, and that the spec is "in theory" performant. None of that matters to developers who just want to use the language...
If performance is a major blocker to adoption and it's as straightforward to fix as suggested - it should get done. Otherwise, the empty promises will continue to hurt adoption.
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> 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?
Writing and reading Perl was meant to feel more like producing and consuming natural language. When in comes to natural language, our ability to use it for practical purposes is a fact, and whether it can be understood rigorously or shoehorned into a logical framework is an academic question. With that in mind, Perl was designed without regard for whether the everyday user of the language could understand the logic b…
Tangentially: it is, though; the two phrases are both valid, but have different meaning. “big dog” is an idiomatic phrase that, when used as such, functions as a single noun, which can be modified by “black” as a preceding adjective (if “black” is in the usual place between “big” and “dog”, the words have their individual meaning not that of the idiomatic phrase.)
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).
rakudo, the language tool, basically translates as "way of the camel" playing on the use of the camel as Perl's O'Reilly book mascot. "Raku" or "raku", would basically be calling the language "camel" and the tool "way of the camel" which has a certain appeal as well. However, the camel has never been really directly associated specifically with the new language except in the names rakudo and raku.
So as I see it, there are good arguments for either side of this. Knowing Liz and Wendy I doubt their suggestion has much more to do with being girly than my feelings on the matter. I think it has more to do with making the clean break really, really clean.
Unfortunately all this furor within the community and even from without has nearly convinced both ladies to leave the community they've been pillars of for two and a half decades. They've suffered personal attacks over this and their participation in anything Perl related is likely to be curtailed if not ended. It's a sad, sad day because Wendy's one of my favorite people at the conferences.
As an outsider who hasn't written perl code in more than a decade this all makes a lot of sense to me. I think of Perl 5 as something "outdated" because I know that there is a language called Perl 6. When I think of Perl 6 I am not particularly interested in it because I assume it's more or less the same as the "old" Perl, which I don't use and didn't really like back in the day. Renaming Perl 6 to something else wou…
If Perl 6 is renamed, Perl 5 could skip to Perl 7 in the next version to avoid confusion.
I think an interesting question is, if the developers of Perl 6 knew from the beginning that they are essentially designing a new language with a new identity, would their new language be different and to what extent?
There are many, many languages that have been closely related but with wildly different names. There have also been plenty of languages which shared mostly the same name but are very different. It might be easy to see a mistake here in hindsight, but when the project first started that was much less clear.
What did Perl do better than others when it came out?
But it scales only slightly better than sh into large programs.