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Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

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Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#331

Post by jandrese »

reuven wrote: post #167

Given how long it took to replace Perl 6, and the fact that I (and most others I know) have moved onto other languages, I can't decide if I'm more (a) surprised, (b) impressed, or (c) indifferent. Kudos to Larry for sticking with it, and for (I'm sure) introducing interesting ideas into the world of programming languages. That said, I have to wonder how many people will really use Perl 6 in their day-to-day work, and…

I don't know, there's something to be said for a language that isn't a moving target. You learn it really well inside and out and your effort isn't wasted as it is thrown away for some hot new fad language in a couple of years or find that everything you learned is now deprecated because the authors decided that functional programming is the bees knees.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#332

Post by 59nadir »

mst wrote: post #322
steveklabnik wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Just woke up to this. Sorry, it seems as someone else mentioned, That's cute, but $FOO. is seen as really condescending here. It's literally diminutive, suggesting that something might be small and pretty, but not worth adult consideration for Real Stuff. Anyway, if that's not how you meant it, I completely understand. Text is hard. No harm, no foul. Sorry for misunderstanding.

Ok, so, on the one hand, I wasn't trying to be condescending, which is why I didn't say 'but' after 'cute' - the 'cute' was a genuine compliment. On the other hand, the thread started off with "I've already got stuff in perl that does X and it looks like I'd have to write it myself in ruby", then somebody replied with "this already works in ruby, just use alias" then when I provided an example that wouldn't you showe…

"Neat"?

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#333

Post by bmn_ »

jandrese wrote: post #330
whyever wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately unicode in Python 3 is not necessarily better. See http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/ .

If you are anal about getting every edge case correct, Unicode is a straight up nightmare to support. Even in Perl's supposedly superior support has issues. See how deep the rabbit hole goes by reading the first response to the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484/why-does-modern-... There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases. Something as simple…

> There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases.

The post to linked you contained a piece of boiler-plate code which accounts for said cases.

> Have you considered how your formatting is going to look when people intersperse Right to Left words in your output for example?

There are modules to handle this. It of course means that you have to stop using non-Unicode-aware functions like `sprintf`.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#334

Post by jandrese »

bmn_ wrote: post #333
jandrese wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are anal about getting every edge case correct, Unicode is a straight up nightmare to support. Even in Perl's supposedly superior support has issues. See how deep the rabbit hole goes by reading the first response to the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484/why-does-modern-... There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases. Something as simple…

> There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases. The post to linked you contained a piece of boiler-plate code which accounts for said cases. > Have you considered how your formatting is going to look when people intersperse Right to Left words in your output for example? There are modules to handle this. It of course means that you have to stop using non-Unicode-aware fu…

The boilerplate on there is only a start. Any time you read or write a Unicode string, or do any manipulation of the string, you need to consider possible edge cases, and they can be nightmarish.

Consider something as simple as outputting zero padded numbers (so they form a nice column in the output), except that the numbers might not be Arabic, zero might not be 0, they might not be written in the direction you expect, and padding might not even make sense. This is how you go crazy.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#335

Post by Too »

nandhp wrote: post #142
InclinedPlane wrote: post #8

Seems too little too late. Is Perl still relevant in 2015? What would you build in Perl today that you wouldn't build in another language instead? I used to be a big fan of Perl but it seems to have fallen behind the times, I doubt Perl 6 is enough to catch up.

I find that anything involving a lot of regular expressions is easier to write in Perl than in Python. Perl and JavaScript are the only two mainstream languages I know of where regular expressions are first-class citizens (compared to Python, where you need to do `re.compile(r'...')` and store that somewhere).

You don't have to compile and store regexes in python. re.match(pattern, string) can be used right away and it will internally cache the compiled version of your most recently used patterns.

I'm also curious in which type of application regex is so important that it will be a deciding factor of language choice. I mean, if you have a regex in one out of 100 files, does it really matter if you have to write 2 lines instead of one.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#336

Post by Grim_Reaper »

krylon wrote: post #4

I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages. At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used…

You will hate and forget Perl 6 If you read this blog -> elegantrant.wordpress.com
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