It says a lot about the history here that Perl 6 gets a 1.0 release, not a 6.0.
Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
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Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better. I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
Modern scripting languages with... parametric polymorphism, built-in parallelism/concurrency, grammars, constraint-based multiple dispatch, etc.? Yes, it will be very important to build up a Perl 6 community and an ecosystem of libraries. That being said, if you want to talk about modern scripting languages, Perl 6 seems like a good choice. Ok, to be fair to functional programmers a lot of these things are old featur…
Modern scripting languages with... parametric polymorphism, built-in parallelism/concurrency, grammars, constraint-based multiple dispatch, etc.?
Not everyone thinks that ticking off a list of feature checkboxes satisfies the most important adoption criteria.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#23They are seriously running the "done by Christmas" line again? They are holding us in contempt.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#24If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368 I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6: subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0; proto fib (…
The author of that snippet was probably just trying to demonstrate multi-method dispatch using a familiar example; I don't think that's how people would actually calculate Fibonacci numbers in Perl 6. I expect most would either use plain 'ol imperative code if that's what they're used to (from Perl 5), or do it with the sequence construction operator (triple dot): my @fib := 0, 1, *+* ... *; ...which looks funky on f…
I wrote the above snippet, but it was basically just one step beyond what Curtis Ovid Poe shows in his "Perl 6 For Mere Mortals" presentation.
My intention wasn't to make people say "wow, I know Perl 5 but now I'll never figure out Perl 6," but rather to illustrate some new features in the context of a familiar example. :) In fact, the above-mentioned presentation introduces P6 features by gradually expanding upon P5 code, showing that you can gradually grow into the language.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#25Wow, pre-congratulations! Let's hope this inspires some renewal in the Perl community. It never made any sense to me that some people would rather see Perl stagnate and die and complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.
some people would rather ... complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.
That's not entirely fair. Some of us doubters spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to help it move forward before deciding it wasn't worth it.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#26It says a lot about the history here that Perl 6 gets a 1.0 release, not a 6.0.
That is because it is version 1.0 of Perl 6. The '6' is not a version: 'Perl 6' is the name of the language.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 will have its 22.0 release this May.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#27As I said over on perl.org: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I have been keenly looking forward to this for a long, long time. I think there's a good chance that Perl6 will not only become 'relevant in the large', once again, but also, once again, be a driving force in the overall improvement of our industry.
I agree: Perl could lead the industry by example to slow down and take 15 years to ship everything. Then everybody wouldn't have to work overtime so hard and so often, toil late into the night burning the midnight oil, and ignore their families, pets and social life.
I want to downvote you for the played out jab, but your sentiment on the industry in general is worth being heard.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#28I can't find it right now, but I like how this harks back to the original announcement that Perl 6 would be ready in time for Christmas—just with no commitment to which Christmas.
This original announcement, which said "18 to 24 months, with a prerelease targeted for [July 2001]"?
http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/articled5d3.html?sid=00/07/...
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#2915 years late...
Late for what, exactly? Do people no longer write code? Because if they do, some of them might might choose to use Perl 6 for that, and that's all the success a programming language can hope for. I see no reason why Perl 6 can't find its niche among people who prefer the Perlish over the Pythonic way to approach problems, but want a modern, consistent, cruft-free language (which Perl 5 is not).
Late to having a large, committed community and momentum. 15 years ago, Perl was Real Big (although I think even then PHP was starting to eat its lunch). If you launched Perl 6 then, you had a lot of active Perl projects you could talk into switching. Now, Perl 6 is Just Another Language, and it faces most of the struggles any new language/runtime would face, plus the added burden of carrying everyone's preconceptions about what Perl is along with it.
Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better. I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
Modern scripting languages with... parametric polymorphism, built-in parallelism/concurrency, grammars, constraint-based multiple dispatch, etc.? Yes, it will be very important to build up a Perl 6 community and an ecosystem of libraries. That being said, if you want to talk about modern scripting languages, Perl 6 seems like a good choice. Ok, to be fair to functional programmers a lot of these things are old featur…
I can't seem to reply to chromatic, but my point here was to address one of the parent post's specific criticisms, that of being "modern".
At least here on HN, rising languages such as Go, Scala, Elixir, and Clojure offer many of these features to help address developers' pain points. The authors of Go have themselves expressed surprise that their real audience ended up being disaffected Python programmers.
If we want to talk about modern languages we have to of course talk about their features. There's more to a language than features, but there was once a time when none of the above languages had much of an ecosystem or community. Rather, they all offer something compelling, such as type safety in Scala, concurrency in Elixir, etc. I just wanted to touch upon how Perl 6 offers many of these things.