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Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

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Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#361
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand, what kind of scripting requires first-class concurrency that isn't fulfilled by say Python?

For concurrency I think Raku has slightly more developed async support than Python, but the bigger advantage, I think, is in parallelism where, aside from the CPython GIL limiting practical parallelism in the main implementation (which is a big deal), Python as a language lacks the parallel iterables produced by the hyper (parallel but constrained to return in order) and race (parallel and not constrained in order) m…

Sounds like multiprocessing.Pool.imap and imap_unordered? When dealing with io you also have async/await equivalent iterators like asyncio.as_completed().

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#362
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all Great language, large library on cpan, great eco system, people enjoy using it, they have a large code base that's run fine for decades. Choose 1 or more. > I moved on in 2011 You're right, it's all about you and what you do...

Hi, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? I'm afraid your comments have already been breaking them quite a bit, and we ban accounts that do that. The idea here is to post thoughtful and substantive comments, not aggressive ones, and to avoid the flamewar style, which degrades discussion quality and provokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Looking at the guidelines, many of the posts I replied to are breaking these rules, yet haven't been flagged.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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…

Seriously...? I last worked with Perl in college (more than a decade ago) and thats perfectly understandable to me. There is nothing un-readable about that code as long as you understand Perl conventions. The more important part regarding code quality was whether that piece of code was encapsulated into an independent function or a snippet of a wall of text.

You should see C++ Templates! Even the idiomatic examples in cppreference.com will blow up your head and require multiple re-reads.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#364
post #129
post #101

This is great news both for Perl and for Raku. I will probably bother to take a serious look at Raku now, sometime, if anything just for curiosity. Why not before? I have no good answer for that. But my main worry about it is that I suspect it has brought along with it the community's dysfunctional fascination with over-the-top cleverness and arcane constructs. I'll probably stick with Python and Perl 5 on an as-need…

Why not before? Because Perl is you know, dead. Jokes aside, it's a pretty nice language apart from the !$double .@sigils. If I'd switch from Perl 5, I'd probably switch to Ruby, as Perl 6 oops Raku is quite slow.

Ruby is also quite slow. The last benchmarks I saw makes it pretty clear Raku has closed the gap with Ruby (at least the mainline C implementation of Ruby) on a lot of fronts, and is likely to be faster for many things in another year or two and the VM gets better at optimization. My google fu isn't up to finding those benchmark results now, but it's no secret that Ruby is pretty sluggish compared to Perl 5.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#366
post #136

Naming matters. Nim changing from "Nimrod" matters. Cockroachdb's name is offputting. Perl 6's name has caused endless confusion and by itself sabotaged both Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 has interesting ideas but I don't even want to touch it because its naming issue is so toxic. I'm glad they're going to rename it.

Is there a TLDR on what's wrong with the name "Perl 6" for those of us who have zero context?

I believe the issue was that Perl 6 had too many changes that made it hard to convert apps from earlier version.

That created some kind of limbo where people weren't sure if they should use perl 5 or perl 6 (”why develop in perl 5, when it is probably a dead end and perl 6 is the future” and at the same time "why should I convert to perl 6, what if it will be a failure and I wasted my time?")

By renaming it, it revives Perl 5 so developent can continue, and at the same time Perl 6 is presented as a new language, now whichever wins will be based on its merit.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#367

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.

Perl gets a lot of flak, I am no fan of it, but frankly the least readable language IMO is bash.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.

IMHO Perl's reputation for noisy code is mostly the result of code golf examples online and denoting variables with an explicit type character. A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.

Since when is it claimed Rust is beautiful? It's one of the most ugly newer languages

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#369
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not before? Because Perl is you know, dead. Jokes aside, it's a pretty nice language apart from the !$double .@sigils. If I'd switch from Perl 5, I'd probably switch to Ruby, as Perl 6 oops Raku is quite slow.

Ruby is also quite slow. The last benchmarks I saw makes it pretty clear Raku has closed the gap with Ruby (at least the mainline C implementation of Ruby) on a lot of fronts, and is likely to be faster for many things in another year or two and the VM gets better at optimization. My google fu isn't up to finding those benchmark results now, but it's no secret that Ruby is pretty sluggish compared to Perl 5.

I sure hope it will be faster because in my own tests it's slower than Tcl. And I've tested at least two releases a year since october 2016 when the stable Rakudo came out.

Ruby 2.5 has a jit which uses the C compiler to generate dynamically linked objects. It looks more like a workaround but it produces fast code. Then there's Jruby, Rubinius, Truffle, mruby. Crystal too, which is a different language but yet similar. No need to learn Go. Just take your Ruby background and pretty much start using it for writing Crystal.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#370
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... apart from the !$double .@sigils In this case, `!$double` isn't a sigil. `!` is just the old prefix operator for negating a value [1]. If you meant to write `$!double`, then it's the twigil [2] for class attributes [3]. Twigils could be considered as secondary sigils but they affect the scoping of a variable. In this instance, `!` is for class attributes and will only be found there. As for `.@sigils`, I've nev…

Ok, twigils, whatever. They're next to each other so they're double the crazyness. Like the $#last_index in Perl. In Raku the . and ! are used to designate a private or public variable within a class definition. I got it backwards, which sort of proves the whole point. Push a private array nested into another and you have a bunch of gibberish worse than in Perl, where you'd only prefix it with \. Use an auxilliary va…

You probably mean: `@{ $hash->{array_ref} }` or `@{ $hash(array_ref) }`.

Either way shows exactly what is the structure of `hash`.

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