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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#201

Post by cestith »

mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

SBCL is not Common Lisp. ChickenScheme is not Scheme, nor is guile Scheme. GCC is not C. V8 is not JavaScript. Neither is SpiderMonkey. clang is also not C. tcc is not C. Visual C++ is not C or C++. Delphi is not Object Pascal. Pypy is not Python, nor is Jython, nor is Stackless Python, nor is IronPython. JRuby is not Ruby. yasm and fasm are not x86 assembly or x86_64 assembly or ARM assembly.

I'm seeing a pattern of things that are named tools which are not the exact name of the language they compile or run.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#202

Post by mkozlows »

devit wrote: post #189
mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

Feels like the big blocker is that it seems to only be useful if you insist on a language that is Perl-like but also modern, but most Perl programmers probably moved to other languages already and don't care about whether their language is Perl-like, and the remaining ones are probably mostly maintaining Perl 5 codebases that they don't want to rewrite. Ignoring the Perl angle, it's a language with a small ecosystem…

The thing is, there are a LOT of new things in Perl 6. Its approach to regexes (with grammars) feels genuinely revolutionary, and it's got a lot of other neat things about it.

I don't think it'd be instantly super-popular if it were a standalone, non-Perl-affiliated language, but I think it'd at least be talked about like Elixir or F# or Elm.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#203

Post by smueller1234 »

coldpie wrote: post #49
DonHopkins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps something onomatopoeic like "$#_@;\>&%}`[*~!^)"

As a non-perl programmer, the mnemonic descriptions in the perlvar manpage crack me up. They probably are useful and make sense to perl programmers, but from the outside, they look like parody.

They're a holdout from a different time. Think 30 years and having an obvious root in shell scripting.

They make sense to shell users coming to Perl. No more or less.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#204

Post by gmiller123456 »

I think it was CPAN that killed Perl, at least that was a major nail in the coffin for me. I have no idea what the CPAN of today is like, but back in the mid-late 90's it was horribly unreliable. There were dozens, if not hundreds of modules that did the same thing, and a lot of them had major bugs. But installing one was the big issue, as it would always choose the latest release of any module in the dependency chain, including the perl interpreter itself. And this was done without any hint as to whether the module actually worked with the latest versions of those modules. So, you'd end up upgrading a bunch of modules, very likely breaking things that worked. And at the end, it'd "upgrade" the perl interpreter. And by "upgrade" I mean install a new copy, replace all OS references to the new version, but not include any of those modules you just installed. So you had to re-install everything again.

Perl's main use at the time was developing CGI scripts. It had big disadvantages over things like PHP and Netscape Commerce at the time, but people still seemed to like Perl. As complex web side code grew more complex, requiring a lot of 3rd party components to get Perl to do anything, people seemed to abandoned it pretty quickly.

I still use Perl today, version 5. Mostly just to process text files, but I still don't use any 3rd party libs.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#205

Post by simcop2387 »

mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

> 3. The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." This wifty "no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you're running is Rakudo and Parrot" distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.

Pedantically, and this also helps serve your point, Parrot isn't used by any modern Perl 6 implementation, it's effectively dead (if not totally). MoarVM is the less ambitious (not trying to support every dynamic language like Parrot was) and more mature VM that is in use now.

And the requisite, ParrotVM is just pining for the fjords joke goes here. It has ceased to be, gone to meet it's maker, it is an Ex-Parrot.

EDIT: For reference, Parrot VM really was named because of that sketch. It started as an April Fools joke and kinda stuck. https://web.archive.org/web/20100718195724/http://www.perl.c...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#206

Post by josefx »

dragontamer wrote: post #62
mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

> But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. (EDIT: And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans). I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at leas…

> Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it

And it always had a single official and complete reference implementation in the form of the Sun JVM and later the OpenJDK. kbensons description makes it look as if Perl 6 had/has neither.

> And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans

Dalvik was intentionally incompatible in many ways and wont run a spec conform jar no matter how hard you try. Might as well call CPython a Perl implementation.

> Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0

With CPython X being the official reference implementation for the corresponding language version and all other implementations being incompatible to varying degrees.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#207

Post by Qcombinator »

spiralx wrote: post #187
dkarl wrote: post #70

Routinely I see in numerous online discussions that people refuse to even consider Perl 6 because they hate Perl. Or there are younger people who think of Perl as "their grandfather's language" (in much the same way people in my generation view COBOL). I am not a fan of Perl, but this feels tragic to me. Perl was so radically different. I remember being on Perlmonks way back in the day, and someone would post a quest…

> The analogy to natural language carried further into practice than Larry Wall could have dreamed. Over the years I've seen this mantra repeated a million times but I've yet to have anyone actually explain what it means beyond a piece of marketing fluff. What actually is this analogy in concrete terms?

A lot of languages — in fact, a lot of software in general — is designed to make things easy for the computer/programmer: "This is how it works and you just have to adapt, deal with it." Larry Wall put a lot of effort into making Perl try to adapt to the way the user already thinks instead, including taking advantage of having studied linguistics to figure out how the "language" part of a computer language fits (or doesn't fit) the way our brains process languages.

The result was a language that has a lot of power and flexibility. People who like Perl tend to love it, because it fits like a tailor-made suit instead of all those off-the-rack languages. People who dislike Perl tend to hate it, because all that power and flexibility can be easily abused (even when you're trying not to — there's a reason so many people buy off the rack instead of making DIY suits).

•https://bigthink.com/videos/why-perl-is-like-a-human-languag...

•https://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html/

•https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#208

Post by yellowapple »

_pmf_ wrote: post #34
roryrjb wrote: post #4

Perl 6 is probably a great language, I'm not very interested in it, for the reasons someone might pick it, I'd probably pick a different language; of course not for any logical reasons, but still. Perl 5 on the other hand is still a great language for lots of reasons. I hope Perl 6 is renamed and Perl 5 will become Perl again and it will be reinvigorated and more people will consider it again. Don't get me wrong, I d…

> Perl 6 is probably a great language, Does it also have the unparseability problem[0] of Perl 5? That's a deal breaker for a lot of tooling. [0] https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393

I mean, it's technically parseable, since otherwise perl (the program) wouldn't be able to function. However, to parse it requires - as that article demonstrates - a preexisting knowledge of what certain words mean, and those meanings are dependent on context. That's easy for perl, since it already has to know what "whatever" means in order to compile/execute it, but is - if not impossible - than prohibitively difficult for something like a syntax highlighter or other tool meant to parse Perl without executing it per se.

Perl is, in this regard, very similar to natural language, which should be entirely unsurprising given that Larry Wall comes from a linguistics background and explicitly designed Perl to borrow various characteristics from natural languages.

From what I understand, though, Perl6's grammar has significantly fewer of these sorts of parsing complexities ("fixing" them was one of the design goals, IIRC).

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#209

Post by [deleted] »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #60
mkozlows wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no saving Perl 5; it's a legacy language in legacy maintenance mode for good reason. Renaming Raku/Camelia could help that language quit being saddled with the perception that it's also legacy in the same way, though.

The current state of Perl 5 for Python fans: ---- Perl 5: I'm not dead! TIOBE: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead! Internet: Yes he is. Perl 5: I'm not! TIOBE: 'E isn't? Internet: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill... Perl 5: I'm getting better! Internet: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment. TIOBE: I can't take 'im off like that! It's against regulations! Perl 5: I don't want to go off the chart.... Interne…

[deleted]

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#210

Post by inimino »

claudiawerner wrote: post #95
mkozlows wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most people don't know or care. They just type "python" and Python happens. If they need to find another implementation, it's possible, but there's no question about what the default implementation is.

Assuming you've installed "Perl 6" (well, Rakudo) you can just type "perl6" and Perl 6 happens.

> Assuming you've installed "Perl 6" (well, Rakudo)

That's the problem.

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