Perl was the first high-level language I learned and I've used it many times during interviews. I still think I can solve most non language-specific interview questions extremely efficiently with Perl. Go Perl!
Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
21–30 of 336 posts
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#22Congrats to the perl community. We should keep an open mind and learn from what they have accomplished.
If perl 6 turns out to be useful for the larger software engineering community (and is more widely adopted), this is wonderful. If not, then we still have another interesting language in the great river of interesting tech things.
Either way, the perl community will continue to do what it does best!
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#23> ++; # An anonymous state variable, for very fast loops
Perl, never stop being you
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#24Seems 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.
Here's something that's normally not too fun to deal with in Python and Ruby: asynchronous operations. Perl 6 has promises, C#-style async/await, Go-style channels, and Reactive Extensions-style Supplies built in as first-class ways to deal with asynchrony, concurrency, and parallelism. It can also take advantage of as many threads as you'll give it. Since I deal with web services a lot, this is a huge boon for me.
But I don't really want to give a laundry list of features, because that alone is not a compelling enough reason to pick a language (P6 obviously needs to develop an ecosystem). As someone who appreciates both OO and FP, both static and dynamic typing, P6 really hits a sweet spot. I encourage you to look at Perl 6 as a new language with the feel of Perl but which solves many modern problems.
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#25> ++; # An anonymous state variable, for very fast loops Perl, never stop being you
If I'm not mistaken, that probaby should have read $++;
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#26Junctions and autothreading seem to be importing the core of APL/J: http://doc.perl6.org/type/Junction (I'm randomly scanning http://faq.perl6.org )
Perl 6 basically hoovered every good programming concept they could think of (and some that ended up being not so good, which have hopefully been shaken out over the last decade). If you want a small language, this is not it. If you want an amazingly powerful language that just allows you to do what you want with a minimum of fuss, pull up a seat.
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#27Some languages are for earning your daily bread (like Java, or Objective-C). Some, like Haskell, are for intellectual pursuits.
Perl is for poetry. For seeing the impossible and going back.
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#28I haven't looked, but I really hope Perl 6 held on to the 50 different ways to do any one thing. Pulling out my hair in frustration from trying to deal with Perl written by other people saved me all manner of haircut money in the 90s.
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#29Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6 and no comments on hacker news an hour later. That's the new headline that sums up Perl: an anachronistic programming language that may never recover from the perl 5->6 decade long 'freeze'. Also the language is crazy to write substantial programs in!
Don't worry, within 24 hours there will be hundreds of comments all explaining how Perl 6 is of no interest to anyone.
It does need to find an audience. People using Perl 5.x are probably working in conservative companies that stuck with what worked. Perl 6 will need 2-3 years to bake. Python 3.x is just gaining some tractions 7 years after its release.
Perl 6 needs to find a problem that it can solve well. Perhaps a great web framework?
Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0
#30> Finally, there's a way to stop non-identical strings from matching just because they have the same numerical value.
Um, this has been there for decades:
$a = '123';
$b = '123.0';
print $a == $b ? 'y' : 'n'; # prints y
print $a eq $b ? 'y' : 'n'; # prints n