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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#351

Post by hnick »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #52
mkozlows wrote: post #48

To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been: 1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)…

> but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years. I don't have any real experience with Perl, so could you maybe expand a little? I'm curious about what you think the limitations are.

I use Perl in my day job and enjoy it a lot, but the biggest showstopper for me is that its greatest strength is its greatest weakness. "There's more than one way to do it", it's amazing at getting things working, it excels at writing "glue" programs to shim between bigger and slower moving parts, especially if they're throwaway hacks.

However all that flexibility means that it's not possible to run static analysis with full confidence. Yes, tools exist - but it's been proven impossible for them to catch all cases, and this uncertainty carries real risks for critical business processes.

When you have a code base encompassing a set of core modules, with hundreds of auxiliary programs using them across the business, then any attempt to update perl or its modules grinds to a halt. It's impossible to even enumerate which programs will be impacted by the change with confidence, let alone the effects of such a change.

For details see "Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof" (https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393). You can mitigate the impact with coding style guides and code reviews but once the damage is done it's very difficult to untangle an existing code base that loads modules at run-time and makes full use of Perl's flexible nature in other ways.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#352

Post by hnick »

justinian wrote: post #348
Grinnz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Perl aficionado, thank you for this, it is rare that anyone who does not enjoy Perl will express a positive opinion for it.

I haven't used Perl since writing CGI in the 90s, and I'm not a fan of the syntax among other things. But I'm great with regular expressions. It seems like everyone around me swears regexes are an impossible black magic, and so they think that I'm some epic level wizard. And I have Perl to thank for that.

I'm a huge regex fan too. The main thing I love about Perl that is missing from most (all?) other languages is that regex is plain old syntax, not an object/function/module.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#353

Post by Stratoscope »

rbp wrote: post #289
merlincorey wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opening block with `:` and ending block with `}` literally killed me.

figuratively

A relevant and rather entertaining article from Merriam-Webster:

Did We Change the Definition of 'Literally'?

Literally every modern dictionary includes this definition

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#354

Post by Stubb »

Grinnz wrote: post #273
Stubb wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to do a multi-threaded map() would be divine. In Python, you're creating/destroying a new process and using IPC to seed the state info and return the results for each element in the iterable arg. If the function in question runs quickly, it ends up being faster to do it single threaded.

It's not going to be efficiently threaded like in Raku, but this is also possible in Perl 5 with a few modules from CPAN. https://metacpan.org/pod/IO::Async::Function will maintain a preforked pool of processes (on Unix) or threads (on Windows), and return Futures, which can be used by fmap_concat from https://metacpan.org/pod/Future::Utils to make a very map-looking iteration. The experimental https://metacpan.org/p…

I'm continually astounded that threading involves jumping through so many hoops in 2019. If you want a language that provides a REPL and easy threading, your choices are few and far between.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#355

Post by marcosdumay »

k__ wrote: post #279
marcosdumay wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was shell scripting with reasonable arithmetic and an incredibly good support for text consumption and regular expressions. Everything you'd miss on a normal shell. But it scales only slightly better than sh into large programs.

I see. Would you consider Bash on-par with Perl?

No, I wouldn't. Perl 5 is much more powerful.

But I wouldn't choose either for a moderately large script.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#356

Post by rwbhn »

Stratoscope wrote: post #353
rbp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

figuratively

A relevant and rather entertaining article from Merriam-Webster: Did We Change the Definition of 'Literally'? Literally every modern dictionary includes this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

My favorite bit: "If you dislike hearing other people use it, you may continue to be upset."

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#357

Post by shagie »

mempko wrote: post #153
mmaunder wrote: post #53

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time. Perl6 was promised.…

What has changed in the programming world so much that Perl 6 (or raku, or whatever it will be called) is now irrelevant? Seems to me we still have the same problems we did when Perl 6 started. In fact, one of its graces, parallelism, no GIL, is an asset now with multi-core. Reactive programming is popular now which is built into perl 6. Functional programming is now more popular which is built into perl 6. Serving w…

I don't need a language with everything built in anymore.

The "one tool to do all of the sysadmin's hacks" isn't much of a thing. Instead of the monolithic system and all of its services, we're moving to smaller and smaller systems in smaller and smaller containers.

As I've gotten older, the cost of going back and trying to read the old code has gotten more and more mentally expensive. Code that doesn't provide a reasonable way (as in "way that can be reasoned about") to be read gets slowly replaced by that which I can get back into the mindset of when I wrote it quicker.

Perl 6 with its myriad of operators is unreasonable. What does ⊖ or ∅ mean? Or −= (note the unicode U+2212 minus sign vs the traditional minus sign - are they different? edit: ok, I can't even add the unicode 'atom' symbol here) or »=«? How do you even type those?

I enjoyed perl 5. I'll still code in it for a quick script... but I'm finding myself leaning more and more to groovy for the scripts in part because I've been writing Java for the two decades rather than perl.

I don't need the abilities that perl 6 provides and I wouldn't want my coworkers developing a DSL.

Perl 6 brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table... but I don't want them in my code base.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#358

Post by shitgoose »

evancox100 wrote: post #250
simcop2387 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." This wifty "no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you're running is Rakudo and Parrot" distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting t…

# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with # while left_angle_right_angle: if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#": continue_next; } print dollar_underscore; } Hilarious...

i either missed the joke or missed the perl6 spec about :} notation. can you explain?

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#359

Post by [deleted] »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #110
0xffff2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. "Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features..." will be met with "Oh, you mean Perl 6? lol." If Perl is dead, renaming the last version isn't going to change anything.

Dead, regarding Perl 6, is an interesting thing. It doesn't mean "no developers or support" because that's at least as true of newly invented languages that HN loves to get excited about. CPAN is a thing and has been for decades. It doesn't mean "doesn't work, not delivered yet" because there it is. It doesn't mean "no exciting features" because that's not true either. It seems to be more of a condemnation than a des…

[deleted]

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#360

Post by Grinnz »

hnick wrote: post #352
justinian wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used Perl since writing CGI in the 90s, and I'm not a fan of the syntax among other things. But I'm great with regular expressions. It seems like everyone around me swears regexes are an impossible black magic, and so they think that I'm some epic level wizard. And I have Perl to thank for that.

I'm a huge regex fan too. The main thing I love about Perl that is missing from most (all?) other languages is that regex is plain old syntax, not an object/function/module.

Javascript has adopted this, among other nice things it's gotten from Perl.
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