Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#311

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

justinator wrote: post #293

chaostheory wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have globals, nulls, gotos, or whatever dangerous (but sometimes useful) features (e.g. states); surprise surprise people will end up using them at one time or another. Perl is not the first nor will it be the last (imperative) programming language helps people fail too easy.

Double check me on this, but Perl 6 doesn't yet have a goto statement, nor does it have globals.

> Double check me on this, but Perl 6 doesn't yet have a goto statement, nor does it have globals.

AFAIK, Perl 6 has a goto statement in the spec (one big change is that Perl 6 is a spec), it just isn't yet implemented in any of the implementations. But presumably the target is to have the whole spec implemented for the release this Christmas. (EDIT: Actually, no, goto won't be in "6.Christmas" [0])

For globals, its has global scope ("our") but variables with global scope are still namespaced based on where they are declared, so while they are globally visible, they lack some of the more problematic features associated with globals.

[0] https://gist.github.com/jnthn/040f4502899d39b2cbb4

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#312

Post by oldmanjay » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:49 PM UTC

raiph wrote: post #307

oldmanjay wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretty clearly have an emotional attachment to Perl, which is sort of lovely to see, but it's causing you to be undeservedly condescending to people who don't have that attachment, which is not lovely.

> to be undeservedly condescending ... is not lovely. It seems like you have just diagnosed someone's behavior without them asking for a diagnosis and your diagnosis is that they are being condescending. See the problem there? And this followed what some might call undeserved condescension: "Pulling out my hair in frustration from trying to deal with Perl written by other people saved me all manner of haircut money i…

You can torture my words rhetorically to score emotional points, but I don't know what you think you prove by it.

If you find my jocular expression of my very real experiences with Perl to be condescension, I'm going to have to let you know that I don't believe Perl to be all that worried about it, incapable as it is of having an emotional state.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#313

Post by Moto7451 » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #139

Moto7451 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few Perl shops in LA writing new code and more than a few maintaining apps that have been around for a while. Lacking the sex appeal of Node and Go (or whatever the next hotness will be) doesn't mean something isn't relevant. Why build something in Perl? The same reasons you'd write something in Python, Ruby, C#, Java, etc: - Mature tooling - Excellent library support - Code samples written for rele…

> There are quite a few Perl shops in LA writing new code These include Broadbean (in Irvine) and ZipRecruiter in central LA.

Yup and Connectivity in Burbank, Rubicon in Playa del Rey, and a few others in Thousand Oaks that run ad networks.

TicketMaster used to have a Perl codebase but I think the murmurings I've heard point to them having switched everything to Java.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#314

Post by Mithaldu » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

acomjean wrote: post #276

Mithaldu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 40 minutes later its trying to autoselect the same broken mirror Sounds like you're in a network with particularly misbehaved firewalls. The initial phase of the auto-setup is very fast, since it only checks file paths. The network part might be slow if some part of your network infrastructure messes with connections and cuts them without properly resetting, resulting in super long timeouts. Not sure what you expec…

Broken install = it didn't install. I had no idea why. I did get there after some hours of struggle . Part of the problem is the libraries on our system are everywhere. Sorry I sounded cranky, truthfully I'm probbly just unfamiliar. I'm a developer not an admin, just want to install packages. We developers love the package systems and cpan pioneered a lot of it. A great package manager goes a long was to helping a la…

> Broken install = it didn't install.

Ah, that wasn't clear.

I have to say though:

> I had no idea why. ... Sorry I sounded cranky, truthfully I'm probbly just unfamiliar.

Yes. CPAN does a lot to help the user and gives a lot of information, but all that information truly does contain 99% of what you need.

It progresses in phases (prep, make, test, install) just like most other make-based software (99% of the stuff installed on your linux boxes) and after each phase it will say " OK"/" NOT OK", so you only have to read for that, then scan upwards to see what errors you got from gcc or whatever. In other words, and i'm not trying to be mean, but: You only have to read what is on your screen.

As for "Gems, composer, npm, rpm", i know that the three non-npm ones don't run tests on install (npm probably doesn't either), so you might be conflating "flawless and easily" with "system incompatibilities are found at runtime, instead of install time". I.e. it's highly likely that what you like of them isn't that they've progressed beyond CPAN.pm, but that they've yet to catch up to it.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#315

Post by rurban » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #159

jedharris wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of other things that haven't been much highlighted: - Perl 6 right now runs very well on two back ends: a custom VM and the JVM. It is spinning up a Javascript back end, I think primarily for NodeJS. - Concrete representations are carefully separated from core semantics, so Perl 6 currently supports native values from C, Perl 5, Python, etc. It should be able to support native arrays as required for high per…

Whatever happened to the ParrotVM? I always thought that it was somehow intrinsically tied up with Perl6.

They switched to MoarVM, which was a simplier and much faster rebooted variant of Parrot to get a timely Perl6 release. But it is still open to use any VM as backend.

Currently there are two in rakudo, in parrot can be re-added trivially, e.g. to support other architectures and a better threading model

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#316

Post by rurban » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #159

jedharris wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of other things that haven't been much highlighted: - Perl 6 right now runs very well on two back ends: a custom VM and the JVM. It is spinning up a Javascript back end, I think primarily for NodeJS. - Concrete representations are carefully separated from core semantics, so Perl 6 currently supports native values from C, Perl 5, Python, etc. It should be able to support native arrays as required for high per…

Whatever happened to the ParrotVM? I always thought that it was somehow intrinsically tied up with Perl6.

They switched to MoarVM, which was a simplier and much faster rebooted variant of Parrot to get a timely Perl6 release. But it is still open to use any VM as backend.

Currently there are two in rakudo, in parrot can be re-added trivially, e.g. to support other architectures and a better threading model

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#317

Post by Mithaldu » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #300

Mithaldu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a language sufficiently different from the main bulk of languages that one must make an earnest effort to learn it before one can read it. Your complaint is similar to someone declaring Japanese insane just because of the way its writing system looks like gigantic and erratic complexity to the inexperienced.

You pretty clearly have an emotional attachment to Perl, which is sort of lovely to see, but it's causing you to be undeservedly condescending to people who don't have that attachment, which is not lovely.

I'm sorry if my comment seemed condescending, but it is a sad fact that many people learned Perl only by reading code and looking up small bits and pieces they don't immediately grok (instead of turning towards and consuming, complete and well-written learning resources both in the perldoc references and books) and then walk away with completely skewed impressions and share them with the world at large.

I wish i had a more polite way of pointing this out when people make complaints, but i have not found one yet. Maybe you have a suggestion?

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#318

Post by rurban » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

jackdaniel wrote: post #236

This rant made me laugh one day: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html Disclaimer: I don't know Perl and I have no opinion if this rant is deserved or not yet it's an enjoyable read.

I'm a born LISP programmer who also happens to know too much about perl. Eric has some points, but not too many.

Javascript would fare much worse than perl with these arguments. It is far more dynamic, far more unregular and produces even worse code than perl5. See e.g. http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpts/javascr...

perl is kind of a lisp - much more than javascript - with some clojure like features, like shorter hash and array syntax.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#319

Post by Mithaldu » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 7:09 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #290

bayesianhorse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

learning Python 3 is easier than reading any Perl...

Learning atomic parts of anything is very easy. Its using those atomic parts to build complex systems that is hard. If there is a operator in Perl 6, which you don't have in Python- Your options are to rewrite those semantics in Python most of them pretty large, and they won't be easy to read either. Ease of learning is a irrelevant metric. You can't use a needle to replace a saw, if you do you are only going to end…

> Learning atomic parts of anything is very easy. Its using those atomic parts to build complex systems that is hard.

> Ease of learning is a irrelevant metric. You can't use a needle to replace a saw, if you do you are only going to end up doing more work.

I adore the elegance of your wording.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#320

Post by kbenson » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

odbol_ wrote: post #306

Mithaldu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a language sufficiently different from the main bulk of languages that one must make an earnest effort to learn it before one can read it. Your complaint is similar to someone declaring Japanese insane just because of the way its writing system looks like gigantic and erratic complexity to the inexperienced.

So what is the advantage of using a language that is hard to learn and hard to understand?

It's hard to learn, but not necessarily hard to understand. That hard learning experience theoretically pays dividends in productivity later as you and more succinctly and quickly express your intent.