Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

pigdog.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 336 posts

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#141

Post by amyjess »

Narishma wrote: post #51
amyjess wrote: post #7

Congratulations Larry and the Perl 6 community! From what little I've played around with the language in the past, I really like it, and I'm glad the community can put the "still in development" talking point behind it. Also, one of my favorite things about Perl 6 is that the Rakudo interpreter prints some of the nicest error messages I've ever seen. It actually offers suggested solutions, and it points out Perl 5->6…

As far as I understand, Rakudo is a compiler, not an interpreter. It compiles perl 6 source files into bytecode that is executed by a VM.

Yeah, you're right. Total brainfart there.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#142

Post by nandhp »

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.

I find that anything involving a lot of regular expressions is easier to write in Perl than in Python. Perl and JavaScript are the only two mainstream languages I know of where regular expressions are first-class citizens (compared to Python, where you need to do `re.compile(r'...')` and store that somewhere).

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#146

Post by ionforce »

mikekchar wrote: post #70
krylon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also the language is crazy to write substantial programs in! I would not want to write anything big in Perl 5. But for small-ish scripts (say, less than a thousand lines) it is pretty hard to beat.

Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. One of the things that people find frustrating about Perl is its expressiveness -- that is, there are many different ways of doing the same thing. The result is sometimes that you get 100 different people doing things 100 different ways. This is not so much a problem with the language as it is with programmers not learning to agree on a set of idioms that they will use for…

> Perl is awesome for writing big programs in.

This isn't even remotely true. No static types, no thank you. Runtime errors due to misspelled methods? Missing hash keys? Hilarious.

Boy, I hope this scalar isn't undefined!

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#147

Post by jedharris »

My sense, playing with Perl 6, is that it could become a "pro tool" -- very deep and powerful. It needs to mature some (though it is very solid already) and to grow its ecosystem (though it can run much of CPAN via Inline::Perl5).

Those who want to play can install from http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/

Larry's talk was a lot of fun, especially the way he zipped around between vi and terminal windows -- no need for presentation software.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#148

Post by Gimpson »

peteretep wrote: post #139
Moto7451 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rele…

> There are quite a few Perl shops in LA writing new code These include Broadbean (in Irvine) and ZipRecruiter in central LA.

Minor quibble... ZipRecruiter is in Santa Monica.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#149

Post by steveklabnik »

mst wrote: post #140
steveklabnik wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this. I tried to draw up a quick gist, but I am late, and I've been writing too much Rust... The basic idea is this: module Mst def self.included(base) # define a method on base using define_method named :before, which takes an # argument and a block # in that method, you grab the method with that name, using .method() # you then define a new method, named method, which calls the block and # then calls the…

That's really cute. I hope, however, that you can understand from the POV of somebody who keeps being driven off ruby by ruby being too much work, that "you could make it less work by first porting all the perl5 libraries that make perl5 OO more pleasant" isn't really a convincing solution :)

One of my Twitter followers posted a gist: https://gist.github.com/paulodiniz/39698ac1fe5f62e3180e

Sure, I was just addressing the "I don't know how to do that." Rails offer this for models in certain circumstances, for example.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#150

Post by kbenson »

ionforce wrote: post #146
mikekchar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. One of the things that people find frustrating about Perl is its expressiveness -- that is, there are many different ways of doing the same thing. The result is sometimes that you get 100 different people doing things 100 different ways. This is not so much a problem with the language as it is with programmers not learning to agree on a set of idioms that they will use for…

> Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. This isn't even remotely true. No static types, no thank you. Runtime errors due to misspelled methods? Missing hash keys? Hilarious. Boy, I hope this scalar isn't undefined!

Then you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that Perl 6 has a type system and compile time errors functions (but methods are runtime errors - on purpose).

As for missing hash keys... It sounds like you are using a hash when you really want an object. There are cases where that's preferable, but part of that trade-off is that you need to make sure the data is as you expect it. Perl 6 supports tightly packed (C struct equivalent) objects if you choose.

Post reply on HN