Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 463 posts

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#331

Post by bitwalker »

cutler wrote: post #326
lliamander wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine scripting in Erlang. Or rather, I've seen it done and it wouldn't be my first choice. Elixir, on the other hand, has many nice features for scripting, such as better string handling, process pipe-lining, and an excellent set of first-class generic data structures (beyond just map and list). It also happens to have Erlang's fantastic concurrency model.

Elixir still has to borrow arrays from Erlang and it's a pretty ugly implementation at that so no - I would not agree that Elixir has an excellent set of first-class generic data structures.

Neither Elixir or Erlang have real arrays, unless you want to count tuples. That said, I don’t see how that correlates to scripting, the data structures that are first class in Elixir are very ergonomic and certainly flexible enough to tackle pretty much any task you’d use a scripting language for.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#332

Post by cutler »

Myrmornis wrote: post #263
dnautics wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 100ms startup time really a big deal for something that is either going to be manually triggered or cronjobbed and expected to take on the order of minutes?

Those sorts of startup times discourage writing command-line tools (e.g. composable text processing things one might join with pipes).

Ruby scripting has occupied the sysadmin space for over a decade yet on my 2013 Macbook Pro the latest Ruby 2.6.5 takes around 250ms to start. That's a mere 1/4 of a second. Sure, Python, Perl and PHP have shorter startup times but surely this is a non-problem?

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#333

Post by commandersaki »

pmoriarty wrote: post #126
Upvoter33 wrote: post #73

I'm amazed that Perl is still around. I personally find it the least readable language that I've ever used, and that includes a lot of languages. But some people really seem to love it, for reasons a bit beyond me.

How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really didn't know it very well, if at all. Some of them might have glanced at some Perl code and saw a dense regex and dismissed it as "line noise". Well, yeah, if you don't know regexes you would be forgiven for thinking it was line noise, but if you did know regexes it should look no m…

'x' is an operator...

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#334

Post by cutler »

tombert wrote: post #140
davidw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang is great, and I miss working with it, but I'd never want to write much in the way of 'quick scripts' with it. Something like Ruby feels much more productive for that.

Heh, escript isn't so bad once you get used to it. Clojure would be a great language for small-ish scripts if it weren't the dog-slow startup times, and has excellent concurrency support. I hear that GraalVM might fix that but I sadly haven't had a chance to play with that yet.

Even if GraalVM fixes startup times aren't JVM languages just too long-winded for scripting? Perl, Python and Ruby dominate the scripting world for a reason - standard libraries for file, dir and pathname manipulation written in a concise language. Scripting is a style of coding, not just a means to an end. It is here that dynamic languages excel. Clojure is the leanest of the JVMs but doesn't it still rely on Java for file, dir and pathname manipulation?

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#335

Post by davidw »

cutler wrote: post #334
tombert wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, escript isn't so bad once you get used to it. Clojure would be a great language for small-ish scripts if it weren't the dog-slow startup times, and has excellent concurrency support. I hear that GraalVM might fix that but I sadly haven't had a chance to play with that yet.

Even if GraalVM fixes startup times aren't JVM languages just too long-winded for scripting? Perl, Python and Ruby dominate the scripting world for a reason - standard libraries for file, dir and pathname manipulation written in a concise language. Scripting is a style of coding, not just a means to an end. It is here that dynamic languages excel. Clojure is the leanest of the JVMs but doesn't it still rely on Java f…

There are JVM versions of Python, Ruby and Tcl, so it's not really about the VM itself.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#336

Post by sanderjd »

cutler wrote: post #324
7thaccount wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says they want to work in Perl6/Raku, they likely have vastly different problems than someone using Erlang/Elixer. There is overlap of course (both general purpose), but I can't imagine using Erlang for scripting, while Raku is first class here.

Elixir/Erlang isn't a general purpose language. You pointed-out one reason why - scripting. Computation is another area where the language is deficient. I'd go so far as to say Elixir's failure to challenge mainstream languages for mindshare is down to to it occupying a niche - lightweight concurrency and distributed systems.

Their point was that elixir is a good language for scripting. I'm not sure if this is true but I don't see any reason it couldn't be. I don't think "distributed systems" are niche... I think every web application I've worked on fits that description, which is basically my whole career at all different kinds of companies.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#337

Post by Grinnz »

skinniks wrote: post #305
j9461701 wrote: post #188

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've worked on large 20 year old Java and C applications (OLTP and batch processes) and I can assure you that they can be as ugly as any old Perl code you have dealt with. Saying that I see absolutely nothing wrong with that perl code you are highlighting as being obtuse or ugly. Anyone who understands Perl should not have an issue with that line. It is clear and concise.

Well, the "foo && bar" is a bit of a bashism, idiomatic perl would do "bar if foo" or similar.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#338

Post by Grinnz »

hnick wrote: post #297
jlokier wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It does make it very clear that it is just a data structure (state) associated with a class (behavior).

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#339

Post by pmezard »

weff_ wrote: post #269
labster wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Python 3 have any operators that transform ordinary method calls into concurrent method calls? Perl 6/Raku does.

Is that a bit like Go's `go` keyword? edit: that is, as far as I can tell, after a quick Google, it's not too different from Python's Thread object.

It is, python Threads are system threads.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#340

Post by Grinnz »

pugworthy wrote: post #260
ram_rar wrote: post #5

Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?

Years ago I worked with Rogue Wave Software, which sold C++ libraries. There was a customer who wanted to sort a huge dataset, and RW's sort code took something like 15 minutes to sort. Perl took 15 seconds. I don't know if it was ever figured out why, but it was (is) just one of those signs of how Perl still can be amazing at some things. Still have my O'Reilly 1st Annual Perl Conference bag around. Good times.

A particularly poor algorithm choice for sorting can be catastrophic.
Post reply on HN