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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

#431
post #301
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this might save Raku. Lisp has a social problem: It's been called Lisp too long. People look at some simplified LISP 1.5-esque thing in a programming languages textbook and see a "pure" language (which isn't so pure compared to Haskell, but the creep of what "functional programming" means is its own post) which is completely useless. They don't see modern Common Lisp with its package management facility and its p…

> Calling it Raku is a chance to get what the Perl 6 team actually did out into the world without the stench of death following it. "Raku" = "cancer" in Polish. Not a lot of Polish enthusiasm forthcoming, I'd imagine.

No it is not. "Rak" is both cancer and crayfish in Polish.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#432

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.

I also find it one of the least readable language. Or more precisely, the language that requires the most effort to be made readable. Every language can be made unreadable.

But it is also one of the most writable language. In Perl, for most problems, there is a quick and dirty way of addressing it. It is especially true when it comes to processing text files, the thing that Perl is best known for.

Many languages try to be clean and consistent, it is obviously good for readability, but it means that choices have to be made. Sometimes the best way is the "wrong" way and you have to fight against the language. Perl solved that problem by not having a "wrong" way of doing things, screw cleanliness and consistency.

Also, first class regex are awesome for quick and dirty text processing.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#433
post #352

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…

Thanks for the detailed reply Ovid!

I'm only a novice in Perl5 land (Python is usually my go-to along with Linux CLI tools and Powershell on Windows, or honestly a lot of SQL these days but sometimes I reach for Perl5 when it has something I need) but I always keep an eye out for different and interesting technologies and Perl6 is definitely on my radar to check in on every now and then. As you've pointed out, it seems to have a lot of power that could reduce a lot of the one-off scripts I write. I do a lot of basic text file manipulation and any feature that can save me time is valuable even if there is more stuff to learn. To me, Perl6 appears to allow for writing beautifully succinct and readable OO, Imperative, or FP like code. However, if I just need to wrangle some data (throwaway code) it looks like it can be for text what APL is for arrays (a powerful Swiss army knife).

On another note, while I have you here, do you ever plan on putting out another Perl book, but one on Perl 6 (I know there are several already published).

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#434
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, things like sort, grep, uniq, cut, wc, cat, awk, sed, tr, etc etc. You wouldn't want them to take 1/4 second to start up.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#435
post #196

It will have quite interesting implications, especially for former Perl 5 syntax enthusiasts. One could say in Polish they "code in cancer" ("programuje w raku").

Not "z raku"?

No. "Z raku" would mean that "raku" accompanies you and the play on words would be gone because it would be either "programuje z raku" ("one is accompanied by raku the programming language") or "programuje z rakiem" ("codes having/with cancer").

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#436
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have never worked with a strongly typed language before there might be some getting used to that, but any pain is well worth it. Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing. Oh and it’s literally 100x faster than Ruby in some cases.

> Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing It would be, but IME Crystal, or statically typed programming languages that don't have a type system at least as powerful as Haskells in general, don't get anywhere remotely close to that, and the overhead added to get what they do give is of dubious net benefit outside of large projects. And even with Haskell, while you can express a much…

I don't get it. How many types do I need, before the kind of data I am talking about becomes better represented by an object comprised of smaller pieces?

Why would I want to spend my time "type level programming"?

Maybe I don't understand what's meant by a type. Is it on the level of string/double/int, or is it expected to cover more (string with a well formatted ISO 8601 datetime, etc)? What is accomplished that couldn't be done in vanilla Ruby with an object representing a more complex datatype with its own getters/setters to cover validation?

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#437
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raku isnt falling from public favor, it hasn't made it yet. It's an entirely different language to Perl 5. Like the difference between C and C# or Java.

Yea, sorry I'm not super familiar with the project, but that is the general vibe I get about Perl. Interestingly enough 落(raku) also has the connotation of failure or missing the target, so not very auspicious in the context of a new language either!

> that is the general vibe I get about Perl.

Perl did make it, it was quite big in the 90s and early 2000s.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#440
post #301
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this might save Raku. Lisp has a social problem: It's been called Lisp too long. People look at some simplified LISP 1.5-esque thing in a programming languages textbook and see a "pure" language (which isn't so pure compared to Haskell, but the creep of what "functional programming" means is its own post) which is completely useless. They don't see modern Common Lisp with its package management facility and its p…

> Calling it Raku is a chance to get what the Perl 6 team actually did out into the world without the stench of death following it. "Raku" = "cancer" in Polish. Not a lot of Polish enthusiasm forthcoming, I'd imagine.

And not just Polish, most (if not all) Slavic languages. What a perfect name indeed.
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