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Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

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Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#291
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.

Hah! You don't know how right you are...

> there should be a cryptocurrency based on Proof of Spam Assassination

Did you know that the blocking proof-of-work algorithm in Bitcoin today, derives from the Hashcash proof-of-work algorithm, which was originally designed to prove you are not a spammer!!

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Perl dev a long time ago, and I think it made me a stronger coder. I still miss it, and I've not coded Perl for real in a decade. You're correct about "over-the-top cleverness and arcane constructs" being a problem, but it's also about using code as communication. We code in _languages_, and on one extreme is coding newpaper style - lowest common linguistic denominator. On a good day this is a common, underst…

> On a good day this is nuanced yet clear and informative, on a bad day it is James Joyce. If Raku's "bad day" is basically like "one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century" (according to Wikipedia)… well, then, maybe I should check Raku out!

I think the reference was to languages in general. In James Joyce's Ulysses there are four or five chapters which all tell basically the same story, but written in wildly different styles - one like an ancient legend, another a 'stream of consciuosness', and so on.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#295

Will Zoffix return?

Not sure how to edit, but for those who don't understand this comment, Zoffix was a key Perl6 contributor who recently left because the community and Larry Wall wouldn't change the name to something else like "Raku" among other things I guess. Now that they have made this change, I'm curious if he'd ever come back and start running the test suites again.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#297
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not terrible to get working, but for many people a major point of OO is encapsulation and it doesn't work out of the box like that. You have to install another package or use the inside-out object model to prevent direct access to package variables and 'private' functions are usually by naming convention only. It's just another example of Perl's biggest strength and weakness. Total freedom to build something ama…

Python and Perl have almost exactly the same OO model , yet many people quite like Python's OO, so that can't be it surely... There's no private data or private methods in Python objects. All the properties are right there for anyone to read, protected only by convention. JavaScript and Perl have almost exactly the same OO model , yet many people quite like JavaScript's OO, so that can't be it, surely... There's no p…

I'm not necessarily a fan of the OO in those either :)

I try to use OO sparingly when possible, and in Perl that generally just means I've been using a hash and decide it'd be more convenient that it keep some functions to itself rather than pass it around to other functions.

I will say in Perl's defense, the bare implementation really made me appreciate what OO actually is under the hood. I felt like I understood it much better, especially since it takes a mixed approach (rather than 'everything must be an object, including Program.cs' which I never really enjoyed).

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#299
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every work day for the past 6 months. >To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways. It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things tha…

Huh, I worked at a company that wrote 1.5 million lines of perl together, and we never ended up with those problems. Maybe you picked the wrong co-workers? You can screw up in any language.

Yeah ... most of my 2-company-ago's software stack was written in Perl. Worked very well.

The specific example cited

while(){ $h{$_}++ && ... }

is quite understandable to anyone who has used Perl for more than a few weeks. Its a common pattern. Complaining about this, which is, for the uninitiated, looping over reading each line from STDIN until EOF, incrementing a hash variable indexed by each line, etc.

This is a very common pattern in perl. Draw your own conclusion as to whether complaining about idiomatic language from a "skilled practitioner" is something one should take without a grain or two of salt.

And of course, being Perl, there are many ... many ... ways to accomplish the same task. Leveraging CPAN modules. I'd leave discovering some of the as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every work day for the past 6 months. >To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways. It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things tha…

I have a decent amount of experience with Perl 5 and one of Perl's greatest features is also sometimes it's greatest liability, versatility. It's permissiveness tends to facilitate poor coding styles and methods which is why there's alot of bad Perl out there. Plus Perl 5 is just different for lack of a better term. If your proficient newer languages, Perl 5 and the Perl way of doing things probably seems a little st…

It's different from the newer languages, it's different from the older languages, it's it's own thing. I find it really beautiful for that reason.

Who knew you could do that in a programming language? Not sure I would have ever thought to try.

I even love the above sample while loop, you can tell the person who posted it is good because they can't create too heinous an example. The and $_ provide what I think of as visual anchors that describe a path for the data to follow. Obviously some style minded author could do it better, but it's not bad. The real line noise is from the one-liners for systems tasks I think.

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