Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku • Hacker News Board

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#161

Post by petre » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #106

DonHopkins wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right. I find Rust code much harder to comprehend. But the sigils and the arrow operator are kind of annoying. I think Ruby fixed most of Perl's annoyances and created new ones.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#162

Post by bifrost » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #102

bifrost wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Be careful, "Spam on the Blockchain" will become a thing.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#163

Post by Grinnz » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #26

bifrost wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl.

And other people love chasing new shiny things. I'm yet to see another language ecosystem that solves 99.99% of the problems one might have the way CPAN does. Would I write an API in perl? Nope. Would I write something that massages the data that APIs spit out and processes it, drops into a queues, generates jobs, etc? Absolutely. Mostly because I will write a few hundred lines of code for existing CPAN modules to so…

I'm not sure what gave you the idea that just because Mojolicious is Perl, it would have "a pile of corner cases" while a "simple nodejs app" wouldn't. Mojolicious is built from the ground up to be effortlessly asynchronous and performant and handle all common needs. Don't punish it for the horrible CGI.pm that has been removed from core Perl.

Yes, Perl's threading support is terrible, and I do wish it was as effortless as in Raku. But you'd be surprised how often you actually only need an event loop and non-blocking implementations, and for the rest of the time there's Mojo::IOLoop->subprocess or IO::Async::Function to provide a thread-like model with efficient forking.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#164

Post by lilSebastian » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

ttkciar wrote: post #67

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.

Since the language-previously-known-as-Perl6 will be known as Raku, there shouldn't be any conflict with Perl v6

That would only further confusion

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#165

Post by bifrost » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #24

bifrost wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Man - MRTG... I just had flashbacks to my youth. Loved that piece of software and used it for close to a decade! Anymore Grafana backed by InfluxDB w/Telegraf is my jam for the same general problem set (TIG stack).

Yeah, I probably should update things but honestly if I'm going to do that I'm just going to write my own poller/scheduler and be done with it.

RRD is pretty efficient so I don't have much need to change.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#166

Post by vaer-k » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

weff_ wrote: post #113

7thaccount wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says they want to work in Perl6/Raku, they likely have vastly different problems than someone using Erlang/Elixer. There is overlap of course (both general purpose), but I can't imagine using Erlang for scripting, while Raku is first class here.

I'm trying to understand, what kind of scripting requires first-class concurrency that isn't fulfilled by say Python?

Why should first-class concurrency needs be required to script in Elixir? This question seems to imply that Python is somehow a default language and special requirements must be needed to justify writing in something else. Elixir is general-use and pleasant to write scripts in so seems reasonable to me for someone to do so if that's their thing.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#167

Post by petre » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #132

anonu wrote: post #118

Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late... I learned regex in perl so the language will always have a soft spot in my heart. But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task. There simply is no reason to learn perl unless youre in the unfortunate position of managing some legacy stack.

> But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task. Well, I think Perl beats Python in quick and concise one-liners written from the command line, doesn't it? Not that I know much Perl, though.

It does but it's still annoying to write on a line as opposed to Ruby or Lua. Writing Python one liners with significant whitespace is out of the question I guess.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#168

Post by bifrost » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

lilSebastian wrote: post #25

bifrost wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl.

> Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl. Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?

Its a saying, but since you're being pedantic I'll use my personal favorite example -> Having to use mod_perl or cgi/fcgi is awful.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#169

Post by sdenton4 » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

mhd wrote: post #147

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.

Ditch the major version. As the current one is 5.30, the next one will be Perl 31, the next stable is Perl 32.

There's even a good mathematical justification for going from 5->32; just say that previously the versioning was in log_2 scale...

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#170

Post by chubot » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #50

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.

It's not uncommon to leap frog versions in such cases. PHP went from 5 to 7, for instance.

Yeah there was also no ecmascript 4, it went from es3 to 5 because 4 was abandoned as too complex.