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Perl 6 Optimism

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Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#41

Post by vgy7ujm »

crusso wrote: post #40

I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it. That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days? Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby…

Perl 5 is still as fun as ever. And newer things like Mojolicious keeps adding to the goodness.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#42

Post by toyg »

vgy7ujm wrote: post #30
toyg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this makes it unsexy Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.

I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.

Compared to Perl, the overall under-use of special characters and the forced indentation make it objectively more readable; there is a reason it's often compared to pseudocode.

Age of release is a meaningless metric, btw. For starters, what Python was in 1991 is very different from what it was in the early 2000s, when it reached critical mass. Its modernity is measurable by the influence it had on most languages designed after its success, like Go and Swift.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#43

Post by EvanMiller »

I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time.

Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers!

https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#44

Post by vgy7ujm »

toyg wrote: post #42
vgy7ujm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.

Compared to Perl, the overall under-use of special characters and the forced indentation make it objectively more readable; there is a reason it's often compared to pseudocode. Age of release is a meaningless metric, btw. For starters, what Python was in 1991 is very different from what it was in the early 2000s, when it reached critical mass. Its modernity is measurable by the influence it had on most languages desi…

Special characters, clear visual markers of scope etc. that Python lacks is part of the appeal of Perl to me.

I feel like a dyslectic when I read Python (projects of significant size) due to it being much less visually helpful and that the idea of simplicity falls apart when the problems are not trivial and when multiple devs have touched the code over multiple years.

YMMV of course but that is why your POV is not objective and I disagree.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#45

Post by ryanianian »

bigbluedots wrote: post #37

Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?

A surprisingly huge amount of the Amazon.com codebase is Perl 5. The various back-ends are primarily in Java, but most front-end code is Perl/Mason.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#48

Post by lizmat »

joosters wrote: post #17
simias wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. I used to use Perl 5 a lot but I never considered using Perl 6 and eventually moved on from the Perl ecosystem altogether. The huge advantage of Perl ~10 years ago was the massive amount of CPAN packages but in the meantime python & friends mostly caught up in my experience. Meanwhile the shiny new revolutionary Perl 6 took forever to release and when it finally did nobody cared anymore. Quoting Wikipedi…

I agree, it definitely hurt mainline Perl development when Perl 6 was this promised great new thing. At least Perl 5 never got abandoned, and there is development and bugfixing still going on today. Perl 5 has a feeling of being 'complete' as a language. I guess this makes it unsexy and it'll never be the cutting edge where all the cool devs want to work, but it's rock solid stable and reliable. Now, if only Perl 5 c…

> Now, if only Perl 5 could get a JIT compiler...

Perl 5 running as a slang on MoarVM or JVM would give it a JIT compiler

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#49

Post by octothorp3 »

vgy7ujm wrote: post #30
toyg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this makes it unsexy Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.

I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.

>>To me Perl is more readable than Python.

There's a phrase I never thought I'd see.

Re: Perl 6 Optimism

#50

Post by lizmat »

joosters wrote: post #14
zura wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually use Perl 5 and even Python modules from Perl 6: https://github.com/niner

There are gotchas and unsupported functionality (e.g. 'since Perl 6 does not have the same concept of "context", Perl 5 methods are always called in list context.') which effectively mean that you've got no idea if library 'foo' will work or not without a thorough review of the code. At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon. There's still no sane upgrade path here.

> At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon.

The same could be said for XS. And I do think that all of Perl 5 is relying upon that.

> There's still no sane upgrade path here.

FWIW, my blog post https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to-the-perl-comm... touches on that subject.

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