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Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

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Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#101

Post by natch »

This is great news both for Perl and for Raku. I will probably bother to take a serious look at Raku now, sometime, if anything just for curiosity. Why not before? I have no good answer for that.

But my main worry about it is that I suspect it has brought along with it the community's dysfunctional fascination with over-the-top cleverness and arcane constructs. I'll probably stick with Python and Perl 5 on an as-needed basis, but Raku will be fun to look in on for brain stimulation.

My best case hope is maybe it's clarified some things! Like having an agreed on best practice for how objects are implemented, that would be nice.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#102

Post by DonHopkins »

bifrost wrote: post #16
peterangular wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the compa…

Heh yeah, totally. The only Perl I use these days is oooooooold software (MRTG) I guess with the exception of Spam Assassin and RT...

Ugh. Spam Assassin is so astronomically inefficient and power hungry, that there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#103

Post by KSS42 »

sigzero wrote: post #47
jolmg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way. I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.

They'll probably skip to 7.

Why not Perl 10 or Perl X?

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#104

Post by yesbabyyes »

jolmg wrote: post #46
Ovid wrote: post #2

This has been a huge deal for the Perl community. First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5. But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor. Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" fo…

> Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way. I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.

I think it's likely they will skip the 5, and continue with version 32, or whatever minor they're up to now.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#105

Post by __jal »

peterangular wrote: post #42
yellowapple wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes Perl is that tool, and thus sometimes I'll still use Perl.

Genuinely curious - and not trying to be a jerk... but where do you find Perl fits well? I can only imagine needing it if I'm stuck on a legacy OS/strictly governed environment where it's the only option I have. (ie: governmental work etc.)

Perl is really great at text processing. Pretty much any kind. A lot of folks dislike first-class regexes, but if they're magic in a lot of contexts like this.

My second remaining use is experimental coding. It is probably about familiarity and experience (I've been writing perl since Perl 4), but I find it to be the most fluid, most "fun" language for noodling around and trying out ideas.

I use Python for things other people will have to work on, because it is the current popular kid, so most folks have at least seen it. Not because I especially like it - the GIL is still a performance killer, purity of essence arguments keep obviously useful things (like case statements) out, and (as I'm sure will be demonstrated shortly) there are always annoying people around to condescendingly tell you why you're wrong to want things like case statements.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#106

Post by jandrese »

DonHopkins wrote: post #63
rubinelli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.

Yeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.

IMHO Perl's reputation for noisy code is mostly the result of code golf examples online and denoting variables with an explicit type character.

A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#108

Post by Grinnz »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #91
ram_rar wrote: post #5

Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?

Raku excels at slicing and dicing input data. So, if you need to read from a database or a csv or anything similar, Raku is amazing at taking that data and converting it into the format to do processing on. Not only that, but when Perl 5 was at the end of its life, comparing its libraries to both Python and Ruby, you'd often find the best library was for Perl. Raku should be far faster than Python and Ruby and may in…

Perl 5 has never been at the end of its life (though it was intended to be 15 years ago, things changed), this is one part of what this rename is meant to clarify. It still has a major release each year and modules are released to CPAN constantly: https://metacpan.org/recent

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#109

Post by msla »

Ovid wrote: post #2

This has been a huge deal for the Perl community. First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5. But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor. Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" fo…

And this might save Raku.

Lisp has a social problem: It's been called Lisp too long. People look at some simplified LISP 1.5-esque thing in a programming languages textbook and see a "pure" language (which isn't so pure compared to Haskell, but the creep of what "functional programming" means is its own post) which is completely useless. They don't see modern Common Lisp with its package management facility and its packages which you can manage which provide actual functionality and its FFI bindings to external libraries and the fact it compiles to optimized machine code... no, they only see some parentheses thing which is interpreted-and-therefore-slow (you know... like Javascript on V8... ) and is too elegantly pure to be bound to the outside world. Meanwhile, all the Foogols get new names every couple decades (PL/I to Ada to C to C++ to Java to C#... ) so everyone knows they're completely up to date.

My point is, Perl is a tainted name, because everyone knows Perl is dead and Perl 6 is the Duke Nukem Forever of programming languages. Calling it Raku is a chance to get what the Perl 6 team actually did out into the world without the stench of death following it.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#110

Post by DonHopkins »

lilSebastian wrote: post #10
bifrost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious. Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5. FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Great language, large library on cpan, great eco system, people enjoy using it, they have a large code base that's run fine for decades. Choose 1 or more. > I moved on in 2011 You're right, it's all about you and what you do...

No, it's all about evangelizing and recruiting as many other people as possible to go down with the sinking ship you've committed yourself to.

The Evangelism Hole: Getting People Back to Perl

http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/talk/5758

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