What utility does Perl provide in a world dominated by python?
Legit question. Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is also the only one that can use Postgres for storage. I could not find any blog engine in Python.
Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
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Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#52Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?
a project that wants to use an interesting language with a lot of depth, cool features, great c interfacing, and easy concurrency?
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#53This has been a huge deal for the Perl community. First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5. But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor. Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" fo…
>including being one of the few dynamic languages with a working concurrency model... Elixir is worth a look. It's a pretty productive little language with a great concurrency model.
When someone says they want to work in Perl6/Raku, they likely have vastly different problems than someone using Erlang/Elixer. There is overlap of course (both general purpose), but I can't imagine using Erlang for scripting, while Raku is first class here.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl.
And other people love chasing new shiny things. I'm yet to see another language ecosystem that solves 99.99% of the problems one might have the way CPAN does. Would I write an API in perl? Nope. Would I write something that massages the data that APIs spit out and processes it, drops into a queues, generates jobs, etc? Absolutely. Mostly because I will write a few hundred lines of code for existing CPAN modules to so…
"I'm yet to see another language ecosystem that solves 99.99% of the problems one might have the way CPAN does."
In 2010, that may have been true.
In 2019, I can only think you haven't looked around much recently.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#55What utility does Perl provide in a world dominated by python?
Legit question. Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is also the only one that can use Postgres for storage. I could not find any blog engine in Python.
There are static site generators written in Python you could use to publish a blog, like Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/) and Lektor (https://www.getlektor.com/). But yeah, if you want software that works like WordPress and generates pages dynamically on the fly, I'm not sure there's any good Python-based alternatives.
> If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse
In fairness to PHP, it's a lot better today than it used to be. (Though modern PHP would probably strike a Pythonista as too Java-ish.) And WordPress has had tons of engineering resources poured into it for a decade-plus now, whereas Movable Type has been maintained on a relative shoestring due to its fall from popularity.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#56I really wish the Perl 6 -> Raku change could let it catch up with other languages such as Python. Edit: sorry for the confusion. I meant popularity-wise. I wish the change would clarify to people that Perl 6 and Perl 5 are basically two different languages and people should at least consider Perl 6 as an option when they start a new project.
I don't understand this comment. What needs to 'catch up'? They are vastly different languages with different philosophies, there's problems better solved in either language.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#57Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?
a project that wants to use an interesting language with a lot of depth, cool features, great c interfacing, and easy concurrency?
Yes, and also one where performance isn't a huge requirement (it's improving).
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#58If anyone is interested in working with the language, AFAIK, DuckDuckGo's backend is primarily written in Perl.
Perl 6 / Raku introduces so many new constructs that is almost an entirely new language.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#59Fifteen years too late. But I suppose better late than never.
Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.
I don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete until recently.
Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
#60Hallelujah! Great decision :) it will give Raju a chance to be viewed without the "line noise" lens of Perl 5.
I'm disappointed they didn't take my suggestion to rename Perl 6 to "$#_@;\>&%}`[*~!^)".