31–40 of 148 posts
We are upvoting non-news? It'll be a great announcement if they ship it, but it's just hype now. Also, consider all they are announcing is a version for developers.
It 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.
Wow, 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.
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Thanks for the presentations. Have you seen any performance benchmarks? It would also be good to see Lua included in the language comparisons.
I'm not sure about any current Perl6 vs other language benchmarks; older benchmarks aren't terribly useful because within the past year MoarVM both became the dominant P6 VM and also received substantial performance optimizations. My understanding is that this is one of the big goals of this year. Another one of Johnathon's excellent presentations goes into depth about the kinds of optimizations being made in MoarVM:…
Wow, 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.
The problem I described is when people actually prefer to kill a project through stagnation than to help it move forward - often by active resistance to any real change. Living projects periodically change. Even goals like improving speed often require redesigns and replacements of old components. When the process of change and renewal is shut down or nobody contributes to it, everyone starts wandering off and the project dies.
I'm not a developer of Perl. I'm sure all your input was appreciated by someone. It's a personal decision whether you want to keep putting in that effort, or switch to other tools. I just don't see any sense in attacking Perl 6 any more.
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Better in this case is purely a value judgement... The Perl language is very elegant and powerful, that's why most of the other languages were modeled on it. Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages. By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense.
>"most of the other languages were modeled on it." Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl". "Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl? >Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Perl's time was 15 years ago. >"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages." A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's libra…
>Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl".
I don't know about most, but both PHP and Ruby were heavily influenced by Perl. If you've used both, this should be apparent, if not, you can easily find references on record to the effect. The original statement may have been a bit hyperbolic, but in context and with constraints something similar isn't unwarranted. E.g. "Perl was very influential to many of the most popular scripting languages today."
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Better in this case is purely a value judgement... The Perl language is very elegant and powerful, that's why most of the other languages were modeled on it. Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages. By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense.
>"most of the other languages were modeled on it." Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl". "Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl? >Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Perl's time was 15 years ago. >"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages." A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's libra…
That's an unduly simplistic argument. "Indentation that looks clean" and "Indentation that fulfils Python's specific needs" are not the same: one is a superset of the other. This means that enforcing the latter is in fact an extra burden and a loss flexibility. Whether the burden is less than having to write braces all the time comes down to personal taste, but to pretend that it does not exist is dishonest.
In any case I could get used to the significant indentation. What actually repels me the most from Python is the lack of non-broken lexical scoping, which - together with the "only one expression per lambda" limitation - makes closure based programming solutions awkward and hard to get right in Python. Which is unfortunate because I personally really like those kinds of solutions...
The ironic thing is, that this situation leads many Python programmers to believe that closures are inherently complicated/difficult/bug-prone, and sneer at languages which promote them heavily as "not newbie friendly".
To get back on the thread's topic, Perl 6 is one of those languages where function and variable handling is built on proper lexical scoping, and closures are everywhere. Even regexes are closures, in the sense that they are treated as first-class code objects (that just happen to be written in a different syntax), and if a regex uses variables from other Perl 6 scopes it closes over them.
Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way, but that kind of thing excites me in a way that Python never could.
But to each their own!
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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.
People can say that as much as they like, calling the thing that comes after Perl 5 "Perl 6" certainly SOUNDS like a version number, and the reason it sounds like it's supposed to be a new version of Perl is because once upon a time it was going to be.
"Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0" We are upvoting non-news? It'll be a great announcement if they ship it, but it's just hype now. Also, consider all they are announcing is a version for developers.
"Larry has announced that the Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015."