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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

#371

Post by GolDDranks »

Sharlin wrote: post #244
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #33

From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music"). Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

There was something strangely familiar about the word "raku" but it took me a moment to make the connection. In Finnish, "raakku" is a common name for the mollusc species Margaritifera margaritifera , better known as the… freshwater pearl mussel! [1] I'm really not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or yet another layer of linguistic brilliance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_pearl_mussel

Oh wow, I didn't know that, but I know that there is/was a band called "Raakku ja helmet". I always thought "Raakku" was a humorous nickname of the singer, because "raakkua" means "to cry like a crow", i.e. not so well. But "raakku" meaning "a mussel" brings a whole new level of meaning: "Mussel and the Pearls".

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#373

Post by sundarurfriend »

anonytrary wrote: post #358
kbd wrote: 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?

It was not a version upgrade from Perl5, but instead practically a new language with some similar design principles. So the name was both holding Raku back by associating it with the warts of Perl5, and also holding Perl5 back because people assumed "Perl 6 was the upgraded version so why use the old one". People have been talking for a long long time that the language is different enough to deserve a different name, and things finally seem to have come to a head recently. As a Perl 5 fan and an early ~Perl 6~Raku enthusiast, I'm happy about this change, though it's almost certainly coming too late. Better late than never, I guess.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#374

Post by snapdangle »

Ovid wrote: post #352
7thaccount wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ovid. I'm curious...if P6 had been performant and production worthy enough for your tau-station game, how much easier would the project be than with P5 + Moose? Just curious...I remember you saying years ago that you would've used it if you could've at the time.

The https://taustation.space/ game runs great on Perl 5, but yes, with a robust Perl 6, many things would have been easier to implement. But by "robust" I don't mean just the language—I also mean the ecosystem. There is no DBIx::Class (or related schema loader) for Perl 6. I don't know how mature the web frameworks are. Or even basic stuff like Excel reader/writers (we use lots of Excel for backend data analysis). On…

It's worth checking out the Red ORM, great progress is being made and it feels very Perl 6 native in terms of its semantics.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#375

Post by petre »

popovmp wrote: post #370
petre wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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`.

%hash is an actual hash with a nested array ref inside. If $hash is a reference to such a hash, yes. Never used the second syntax and I doubt that it works with something other than subroutines, but in that case it's either hash() where hash is an actual sub, or $hash->() where $hash is a subroutine reference. Both return an array refetence.

See? Confusing. That's why people hate Perl. At least I'm glad dereferencing is gone in Raku.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#376

Post by pvaldes »

kbd wrote: 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.

Agree. To name another example, I personally can't take seriously anything named 'webinar'.

Webinar is similar in spanish to the word huevina that means "egg beaters" (a replacement cheap and second quality). It sounds also like "web-vaina" (a vaina is "something" and specially used when something annoying happens) and has common roots with words like "huevín" (little testicle) and "huevada" (something irrelevant, lacking of any real interest and a total lose of time).

Definitely looks like something created to be dismissed. I can't thing in a worst 'hype' word for replace (without any real need or reason) the perfectly neutral and good old term 'videoconference'. Webinar is the kind of term that Ned Flanders would use.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#377

Post by Ovid »

snapdangle wrote: post #374
Ovid wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The https://taustation.space/ game runs great on Perl 5, but yes, with a robust Perl 6, many things would have been easier to implement. But by "robust" I don't mean just the language—I also mean the ecosystem. There is no DBIx::Class (or related schema loader) for Perl 6. I don't know how mature the web frameworks are. Or even basic stuff like Excel reader/writers (we use lots of Excel for backend data analysis). On…

It's worth checking out the Red ORM, great progress is being made and it feels very Perl 6 native in terms of its semantics.

Red looks interesting. Though I don't like the mapping of tables to "model". In general, I find that a model should be a consumer of an ORM, not the ORM itself. Otherwise, you expose to much to the business layer and it's harder to refactor.

For example, if you have a column on table A and you later need to move that to table B, a clean model can encapsulate that change. Hard to do when the ORM is being treated directly as the model.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#378

Post by alexmint »

anonytrary wrote: post #358
kbd wrote: 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?

Perl 6 sounds like a successor of Perl 5 but in reality it is a totally new language. Many long time Perl 5 users think a new name for a new language would have been better.

The name Perl 6 was damaging to the popularity of Perl because beginners were confused whether they should learn Perl 5 or Perl 6. The same confusion existed in Python: Python 2 vs. Python 3 but the Python Wiki was always very clear. Until a certain point, it recommended Python 2 and after Python 3 became very popular, it recommended Python 3. That sort of clarity was missing in Perl. Due to the number of new programmers learning Perl decreased rapidly and finally Python overtook in popularity.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#379

Post by jashmatthews »

petre wrote: post #369
SwellJoe wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simila…

The CRuby 2.6 JIT using gcc or clang improves some benchmarks but makes real applications slower, sadly.

Thankfully JRuby already has a functioning JIT and TruffleRuby is getting very close to a 1.0 release.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#380

Post by wodenokoto »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #33

From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music"). Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

Raku means happy, fun or relaxed: https://jisho.org/word/楽

Rakudo means paradise: https://jisho.org/word/楽土

Rakuda is a camel: https://jisho.org/word/駱駝

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