Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl 2019
This one goes to 11 http://perl11.org/
And we'll keep that name and idea.
5 + 6 = 11, as it should have been
Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
191–200 of 463 posts
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
For people who are curious as to why people moved to Python. Some will say because college kids are taught Python, but I think that is a side effect. Perl is an old language, pre OOP. It's a language from the 90s, when everyone was hacking together code not knowing what the future would be like. There is a lack of organization. Perl is like C in syntax, features, and in speed. Python is like C++. Every failing you ca…
Fifteen years hasn't been enough of a chance?
15 years? Raku just recently came out.
Perl was the popular language once upon a time ago. But it stagnated while new technology came in to replace the old.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#193A long overdue marketing move.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#194Kudos for making this change! This is what the folks at Microsoft should have done when ASP became ASP.NET and ASP.NET became ASP.NET Core. I know... keeping the root of the name the same makes management think the technology is fundamentally the same (and, therefore, cheaper) but the SEO confusion trying to find the right version of an answer is a PITA.
Secondarily, while Perl has never appealed to me I am more likely to admit I'm checking out Raku because the chances that someone will ask me to look at and debug their cousin's friend's manager's Perl 3 CGI app is considerably reduced.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#195Earlier 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.
no, it's called cperl now. perl5 didn't see not much improvements for the last 20 years, the development happens only in cperl, which is the perl5 successor.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#196It will have quite interesting implications, especially for former Perl 5 syntax enthusiasts. One could say in Polish they "code in cancer" ("programuje w raku").
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#197This 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-need…
Why not before? Because Perl is you know, dead. Jokes aside, it's a pretty nice language apart from the !$double .@sigils. If I'd switch from Perl 5, I'd probably switch to Ruby, as Perl 6 oops Raku is quite slow.
> ... apart from the !$double .@sigils
In this case, `!$double` isn't a sigil. `!` is just the old prefix operator for negating a value [1]. If you meant to write `$!double`, then it's the twigil [2] for class attributes [3]. Twigils could be considered as secondary sigils but they affect the scoping of a variable. In this instance, `!` is for class attributes and will only be found there.
As for `.@sigils`, I've never seen this syntax. I'm probably out of the loop in this one.
As an aside, sigils are one of Raku's interesting features. They convey information [4] that might not be easy to discern from just looking at the code. What kind of structure is this variable holding? Is it holding an array? A hash? A code object? What's the scope of this variable? Is it class-scoped? Is it dynamically-scoped? Is it a compile-time variable?
> ... Raku is quite slow.
This is a legitimate reason for avoiding the language. However, it's worth pointing out that Raku core developers have made great improvements to the language in the speed department since it was first officially released in 2015. They recognize there's a lot of room for improvement. [5]
[1] https://docs.perl6.org/routine/!
[2] https://docs.perl6.org/language/variables#index-entry-Twigil
[3] https://docs.perl6.org/language/variables#index-entry-$!
[4] https://docs.perl6.org/language/faq#Why_sigils?_Couldn't_you...?
[5] https://docs.perl6.org/language/faq#Is_Perl_6_fast_enough_fo...?
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find programming perl fun inversely to program size and proportionally to the need to slice and dice text. I didn't learn perl until the perl 5 era, but from what I can tell, I would've been as satisfied with perl 4, before they bolted on OO and tried to expand the applicable problem domain of the language. I mostly just use it as a super-charged awk and bash replacement for scripting.
The bolted on OO is really just one new function...bless(). The rest is package namespaces, which are also used for non OO purposes. I'm never sure what people don't like about OO Perl. There's a tiny bit of boilerplate in a constructor, other than that, it doesn't seem different from other OO script languages.
Agreed. Not to mention, from what I understand they just borrowed the OO system from Python, so it shouldn't be that foreign to most people.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#199Is that from the Bible?
Does not sound like anything from the Bible I have ever read. Theres other commentary on this HN post about the many meanings of the name though.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#200Earlier 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.)
If it involves a lot of text processing, Perl tends to be either my first choice or pretty close to it. Perl's also surprisingly fast for an interpreted scripting language (especially when it comes to text processing). I've used it pretty heavily for system automation tasks, too, and thus generally continue to do so unless there's some specific reason why I'd need to use a different language (and usually there ain't).
I've heard that Perl's also massively popular in the genetics/bioinformatics world. I'm assuming a lot of their data is in textual formats, and thus would benefit from a language that's fast at processing that data. I have no experience here, though.