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Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl over a marginally faster runtime like Python or Java.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Late for what, exactly? Do people no longer write code? Because if they do, some of them might might choose to use Perl 6 for that, and that's all the success a programming language can hope for. I see no reason why Perl 6 can't find its niche among people who prefer the Perlish over the Pythonic way to approach problems, but want a modern, consistent, cruft-free language (which Perl 5 is not).
If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better. I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368 I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6: subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0; proto fib (…
It never made any sense to me that some people would rather see Perl stagnate and die and complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better. I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
Better in this case is purely a value judgement... The Perl language is very elegant and powerful, that's why most of the other languages were modeled on it. Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages. By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense.
Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl".
"Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl?
>Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time.
Perl's time was 15 years ago.
>"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages."
A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's library ecosystem is more comprehensive than Perl's language. Because most any language minus all of its libraries is less "comprehensive" than another language's libraries, simply because most mature library ecosystems are much more massive than the language itself.
Even if you compare apples and apples then oranges with oranges, Perl is a terrible language compared to most other languages, and most of CPAN is terrible outdated crap compared to other language's libraries. Python, Ruby, Java and JavaScript all have much richer and more up-to-date library ecosystems than CPAN.
>"By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense."
Is the worst thing you can say about Python that it forces you to indent your code? Then I'd hate to see the haphazardly indented code you write in Perl. Good programmers don't find that to be a problem, because they indent their code properly anyway, and Python simply lets you do that without inserting a lot of punctuation. But inserting lots of punctuation is what it's all about with Perl, isn't it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Late for what, exactly? Do people no longer write code? Because if they do, some of them might might choose to use Perl 6 for that, and that's all the success a programming language can hope for. I see no reason why Perl 6 can't find its niche among people who prefer the Perlish over the Pythonic way to approach problems, but want a modern, consistent, cruft-free language (which Perl 5 is not).
If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better. I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
Yes, it will be very important to build up a Perl 6 community and an ecosystem of libraries. That being said, if you want to talk about modern scripting languages, Perl 6 seems like a good choice. Ok, to be fair to functional programmers a lot of these things are old features. But for the mainstream scripting languages, these are really new and powerful tools -- tools worth learning.
If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368 I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6: subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0; proto fib (…
I expect most would either use plain 'ol imperative code if that's what they're used to (from Perl 5), or do it with the sequence construction operator (triple dot):
my @fib := 0, 1, *+* ... *;
From what I've seen so far, Perl 6 code is still similar to Perl code. Presentation snippets tend to focus on specific new features and should not be taken as representative samples of real-life code.
I hope Perl 6 has better runtime speed and memory efficiency because those are the only downsides of Perl 5. However I seriously doubt that will be the case. Perl 6 will most likely be more bloated and slow, but I very much hope that I'm wrong. Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl…
perl6 has much more features than perl5, it's a completely different world. I wouldn't call that bloat.
If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368 I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6: subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0; proto fib (…
Thanks for the presentations. Have you seen any performance benchmarks? It would also be good to see Lua included in the language comparisons.
Another one of Johnathon's excellent presentations goes into depth about the kinds of optimizations being made in MoarVM: http://jnthn.net/papers/2014-yapceu-performance.pdf