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Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

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Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#61

Post by Mithaldu »

smithkl42 wrote: post #42
pjc50 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the freeze killed momentum and left the community to wither. Python's transition was much better but is still not quite complete, and consumed a lot of time and effort. Making a backwards-incompatible change to a programming language == making and launching a new language, with all its difficulties.

If Python's transition actually was much better, that says quite a bit about how awful the Perl transition is gonna be - since the Python 2->3 transition seems pretty widely acknowledged to be a disaster.

There is not and will not be a transition. It is a completely new and different language.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#62

Post by tcdent »

krylon wrote: post #4

I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages. At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used…

> I still haven't come around to learning Python 3

I'm not using it everyday yet either, but it's not a whole new language. More like just a few cleanups to sensitive portions of the API.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#64

Post by chm »

kbenson wrote: post #49
chm wrote: post #45

So, for someone who has never read or written Perl code, where should I start? Perl 5 or 6? I get that they're different languages, but I want to see what "Perl" is like.

> but I want to see what "Perl" is like > get that they're different languages I'm not sure you do get it, unless you are talking about the "feel" of using it, in which case use either. They aren't just different languages because there's some things that break backwards compatibility, they are vastly different in many ways. If you want to know what current deployed Perl is like, look at Perl 5. If you want to look a…

I was talking about the "feel", indeed. So for example, if someone wanted to experience what a Lisp is like, I could point them to Scheme.

I want to know what "Perl" is like, but the fact that Perl 5 and 6 share the same name is a tad confusing for a newcomer. Precisely because I have no idea what "standard" Perl is.

I guess Perl 5 it is, since it's already on my machine.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#65

Post by stone-monkey »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #8

Seems too little too late. Is Perl still relevant in 2015? What would you build in Perl today that you wouldn't build in another language instead? I used to be a big fan of Perl but it seems to have fallen behind the times, I doubt Perl 6 is enough to catch up.

This was something that was tangentially addressed yesterday - the idea was that Perl 6 isn't meant to be a flavor of the week language, but something that could conceivably last for decades.

One interesting thing Larry mentioned related to that long term view was that due to Perl 6 being a multi paradigm language, it could potentially become the defacto teaching language in academia, because it fulfills the roles of OO, functional, procedural, and logic programming in a single package. Eventually, that new generation of Perl 6 learners would go on to form startups and create bigger and better things. I'm not sure if this will come to fruition, but I think it's certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#66

Post by peatmoss »

abc_lisper wrote: post #50
muraiki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something that's normally not too fun to deal with in Python and Ruby: asynchronous operations. Perl 6 has promises, C#-style async/await, Go-style channels, and Reactive Extensions-style Supplies built in as first-class ways to deal with asynchrony, concurrency, and parallelism. It can also take advantage of as many threads as you'll give it. Since I deal with web services a lot, this is a huge boon for me. B…

Are you talking about Clojure ;)

As a fan / dilettante of Clojure, I'd say no. The JVM is many nice things, some nasty things, but definitely not lightweight in terms of things like startup speed that I'd expect of Perl 6.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#67

Post by iamreverie »

krylon wrote: post #4

I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages. At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used…

same here, had to do a double take when i saw the headline in my email. it's been so long perl 6 has become somewhat of a running joke.

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#69

Post by baudehlo »

bbanyc wrote: post #58
bgilroy26 wrote: post #41

I love Perl [I have been to perl monger meetings and I had to look up how to 'unshift' in python today]. But Python3 is mostly just Python2 with a print function instead of a print keyword. It is occasionally non-trivial to port large existing code bases from Python2 to Python3, but it is practically always trivial for a Python2 programmer to write new code in Python3. I hope Perl 6 will get its own camel book!

I remember buying the camel book ten years ago, and there was a slim Perl 6 volume next to it - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007379.do I imagine its relevance to the Perl 6 that was announced today is next to nil.

The Perl 6 camel book will probably be published like TAOCP. /s?

Re: Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0

#70

Post by mikekchar »

krylon wrote: post #6
ryanobjc wrote: post #2

Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6 and no comments on hacker news an hour later. That's the new headline that sums up Perl: an anachronistic programming language that may never recover from the perl 5->6 decade long 'freeze'. Also the language is crazy to write substantial programs in!

> Also the language is crazy to write substantial programs in! I would not want to write anything big in Perl 5. But for small-ish scripts (say, less than a thousand lines) it is pretty hard to beat.

Perl is awesome for writing big programs in. One of the things that people find frustrating about Perl is its expressiveness -- that is, there are many different ways of doing the same thing. The result is sometimes that you get 100 different people doing things 100 different ways.

This is not so much a problem with the language as it is with programmers not learning to agree on a set of idioms that they will use for a project. They are not reading each others code and having discussions about what they want to see.

Languages that impose "the one true way" cut down on the apparent problems, but you are still going to have massive issues down the road if you build large projects because nobody is paying attention to what the other people are doing. Especially on large projects, it is vital that people read and comment usefully about design issues. In such large projects, removing the choice of idioms available though language design is a bit like deciding not to carry a canary down the mine with you because it keeps getting killed by poisonous gas.

The expressiveness of Perl allows you to choose the idioms that will work best for your team/project. It is true that it requires more discipline and communication, but these are the things that are necessary for success on a big project anyway.

I haven't written any Perl code for years now, but I have always been fond of it. I find that I can write better code in Perl than in many of the more restrictive languages that I've used.

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