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Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

pigdog.org

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Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#111

Post by matthewn »

tcdent wrote: post #89

I'm really surprised this site is the source y'all chose to upvote. Not only was the second-newest article published in 2012, they also have an assortment of other questionable content[0][1]. Advertising from rotten.com and a category named "Jonny Jihad" are also professional touches. I mean, whatever floats your boat, but HN, is this really one of your go-to trusted news sources? [0] http://www.pigdog.org/in_the_pin…

I was delighted to see pigdog.org appear on the front page of HN; I thought it had died years ago (and I guess it mostly did). The Pigdog Journal was a Big Deal for a certain clique of nerds/technologists in the late 90s/early 00s. (You know, when Perl was also a Big Deal.) The web was a smaller, zanier place then; for those that remember that web, pigdog.org brings a wave of nostalgia.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#115

Post by andrepd »

krylon wrote: post #4

I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages. At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used…

What is there to learn about Python 3? It's just a relatively small, but backwards-compatibility breaking, update.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#116

Post by Moto7451 »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #8

Seems too little too late. Is Perl still relevant in 2015? What would you build in Perl today that you wouldn't build in another language instead? I used to be a big fan of Perl but it seems to have fallen behind the times, I doubt Perl 6 is enough to catch up.

There are quite a few Perl shops in LA writing new code and more than a few maintaining apps that have been around for a while. Lacking the sex appeal of Node and Go (or whatever the next hotness will be) doesn't mean something isn't relevant.

Why build something in Perl? The same reasons you'd write something in Python, Ruby, C#, Java, etc:

- Mature tooling - Excellent library support - Code samples written for relevant projects by vendors for their libraries [0] - Experts available

Given the fact that there are a lot of good options, it's probably best to factor in, "Do I like it?" and/or "Would someone pay me for it?". For all the above the answer is yes.

Additionally, Perl 6 is more or less a new language. If it scratches enough developer's itches, it'll likely take off on its own. It's mostly getting flack due to taking forever and Perl 5's perceived lack of sex appeal. I think if you frame your question with languages like Lua, Haskel, Schema, etc you'll find a good set of answers from users in each community.

[0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/...

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#117

Post by andrepd »

Rotten194 wrote: post #105
py3kthrowa wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or until you trip over the API differences between str and bytes in Python 3 that do not exist in Python 2 (because str == bytes in Python 2). Chiefly, printf-style formatting... >>> b"%u" % 5 Traceback (most recent call last): File " ", line 1, in TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for %: 'bytes' and 'int'

Why are you using % at all? It should have been deprecated years ago.

Why? Maybe it suits his use case better than .format() or whatever.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#118

Post by cygx »

nv-vn wrote: post #107
haberman wrote: post #77

> One of the most impressive things Larry demonstrated was the sequence operator, and Perl 6's ability to intuit sequences. say 1, 2, 4 ... 2**32 > This correctly produced a nice tidy list of just 32 values -- rather than the 4,294,967,296 you might expect. Someone with more time than me needs to find an IQ test that is based around sequence questions like this and plug them all into Perl 6. So we can find out what P…

This is cool but I still don't get how it is able to distinguish between linear, power, exponential, etc. sequences so easily. Would be incredibly interested in reading about the technology they're using for this and how complex it can get.

Linear and geometric sequences are auto-detected, for anything else you'll need to provide a function to compute the next element:

  2, 4 ... *        # linear
  2, 4, 8 ... *     # exponential
  1, 1 ... *        # constant
  1, 1, * + * ... * # Fibonacci
The last expression is equivalent to the more verbose variant

  1, 1, -> $a, $b { $a + $b } ... *
that makes use of an 'pointy block' (ie lambda function) instead of the Whatever-*.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#120

Post by kbenson »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
haberman wrote: post #77

> One of the most impressive things Larry demonstrated was the sequence operator, and Perl 6's ability to intuit sequences. say 1, 2, 4 ... 2**32 > This correctly produced a nice tidy list of just 32 values -- rather than the 4,294,967,296 you might expect. Someone with more time than me needs to find an IQ test that is based around sequence questions like this and plug them all into Perl 6. So we can find out what P…

> This correctly produced a nice tidy list of just 32 values 33, not 32, right? (2 0 through 2 32, inclusive)

Yes, 33 (although HN ate your double asterisk, like it did the original comment's initially).

    # perl6 -e 'say +(1, 2, 4 ... 2**32).elems;'
    33
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