371–380 of 424 posts
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.)…
There was talk about Perl 6 being ready soon. It sounded really cool like many people I was quite excited about it.
Sadly the screwing around and refusing to give a real release date really messed things up ("It will be ready by Christmas, we just aren't saying which year"). I moved on to Python - which has been a good move career wise, but its a shame as I enjoyed using Perl and Perl 6 does have a lot of interesting ideas.
Like you say, I have no idea about the release status either.
Jeremy Howard (co-founder of Fastmail (Perl used for everything), co-founder of fast.ai, etc.) in his Lex Firdman interview this week, made some interesting comments on Perl and Larry Wall no longer taking enough interest in the language. I don't use Perl, but the comments were interesting anyway.
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Sure, but most people don't know or care. They just type "python" and Python happens. If they need to find another implementation, it's possible, but there's no question about what the default implementation is.
> Sure, but most people don't know or care. A lot of people care. It costs $3500 per server to run Zing Java. Every user of Zing cares enough to pay $3500. Everyone who has written an Android app cares about the distinction too. Dalvik has different quirks than regular Java. (EDIT: Oh boy, that shows how out of date I am. Apparently Android is now using Android Runtime instead of Dalvik....) > If they need to find an…
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> Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it And it always had a single official and complete reference implementation in the form of the Sun JVM and later the OpenJDK. kbensons description makes it look as if Perl 6 had/has neither. > And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans Dalvik was intentionally incompatible in many ways and wont run a spec conform jar no matter how hard you try. Might as well call C…
> And it always had a single official and complete reference implementation in the form of the Sun JVM and later the OpenJDK. True though even in the mid to late 90s there were other JVMs available from companies such as Microsoft and IBM. In fact for a period, Sun’s JVM was one of the worst implementations despite being the reference implementation.
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…
Sadly, during my career I've actually never met a kindred perl loving soul.
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.…
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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?
Larry was trained as a missionary and educated as a linguist. He came to language development with the perspective of a linguist. This is why Perl has context and pronouns. There's a scalar vs. list context when calling a subroutine. Some Perl builtins return different things in the different contexts. Your subroutines can as well, for example by using wantarray() in your code. For example, in list context returning…