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Why I’m Learning Perl 6

evanmiller.org

61–70 of 380 posts

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#61
post #15

why is everybody saying they are put off by Go? Did we pass the "trend" phase and now it's cool to say go sucks?

I don't know about others, but I personally have always seen Go as an internal language for Google. This made me feel like it was appropriate for projects that I personally control, but unlikely to be useful in a career. That's really just a feeling, though, and I recognize that if everyone felt like I do, it would make Go a niche language that was actually probably pretty lucrative to know. So I wouldn't say I'm put…

I can't speak for your location but I've found no shortage of companies choosing Go in London; from fintec through to online games. So it's definitely not a niche language used only by Google.

I can understand other people's complaints about the language though.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#62
post #26

On a sidenote > or Nginx or Node.js without the callback cacciatore. What's a cacciatore in this context? It means hunter in Italian. Probably something messy if it means the same as callback hell.

I read it as a short version of chicken cacciatore, which is a dish with an appearance that may look messy.

That makes sense I suppose, it's a cacciatore made with callbacks instead of chicken.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#63
post #26

On a sidenote > or Nginx or Node.js without the callback cacciatore. What's a cacciatore in this context? It means hunter in Italian. Probably something messy if it means the same as callback hell.

cacciatore is a style of rustic stew in Italian cooking.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#64
post #58
post #9

> Why is this important? Concurrency is hard and if you want M:N thread multiplexing (i.e. WEB SCALE CODE, where application threads aren’t pinned to pthreads) your options today are precisely Erlang, Go, .NET, and Perl 6. I guess the author doesn't know about Haskell? The concurrency story for Haskell is great, and using the right library, you can literally just define types for the routes for your backend and then…

By "right library" do you mean Servant? (I'm interested.)

Yep. Servant is great.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#65
I hate perl6. I hate it because I tried to get involved in the project early on, and it led me down the Haskell rathole. I don't know what Haskell looks like today, but a decade or more ago it was the hardest language to pick up that I had ever experienced. It was as if I had a solid background in latin languages and I was trying to pick up Chinese based on a handful of tutorials written by a tourist on the back of a napkin.

But it has been a decade and I am truly impressed with what it has turned into. Unfortunately, it has to re-gain mindshare as if it was starting from scratch. It might be a little bit harder actually, because there are a variety of scripting languages these days that are easy to learn, and there are still more than a few people who actively don't like Perl.

I really liked this slideshow: http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/

It gives a good review of Perl6 from early 2016. The video is an hour and a half, but it only takes a few minutes to scan through the slides and find the interesting pieces. (left and right arrow to navigate the slides)

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#66

Thing that really gets me about perl is the syntax, it's horrendous. No other reason, that's all. Just the syntax.

It's _different_. But working for a few years with Perl 5, it really grew on me. It could use a good "Perl: The Good Parts" book, I guess. I haven't looked at Perl 6 yet, don't know if that's better or worse. Too many other things to do, and I don't think I'll ever work with Perl professionally again, that ship has probably sailed.

Higher Order Perl might serve for that. (I haven't really read any other Perl books.)

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#67
post #38
post #11

Without a "Major" sponsor, or a "Rails" type killer application, Perl 6, or indeed any language, will struggle to get significant traction. It is of course possible to gain slowly over time, but with numerous languages competing, that path may be a dead-end.

Perl 6 still has to overcome Perl 5, which is everywhere and is a great language. I never get around to using Perl 6 because 5 is already there in every Linux distribution.

I wish Linux distros shipped with more recent language versions, e.g. Python 3.6 and Perl 6 in addition to just 3.4/5 and 5. I understand that it's not their job to try and push people to update their language skills, but it'd be nice to have access to them right off the bat if they feel like it.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#68

I'll stick with Tcl if I'm going to use a glue language that has green thread like functionality and an event loop. early choices were tcl or perl: went Tcl and never looked back. As far as web development in perl..well have fun convincing everyone on the node.js and python bandwagons to move 'back' to perl. Glad it works for you.

I hadn't heard of Tcl before but it looks awesome! What do you find its ideal use cases to be?

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know why people are downvoting this.

Ehh... I don't really understand the impulse to "call out" downvotes, or ask people to explain why they're downvoting something that you wrote or agree with. It's probably just my age, as I started out online when most discussion forums lacked explicit voting mechanisms. Before social media came along, and "gamified" human conversation. Maybe it helps police trolls, but at the cost of encouraging group-think and exce…

There's a difference between downvoting because you don't like the tone or don't agree on something subjective and downvoting because something is incorrect or inaccurate. If people downvote because it's incorrect I'd like to know what's incorrect about it.

> But anyhoo, at the time I saw this (45 minutes after my original comment), my comment had 25 votes and was the top-most thing on this page.

It was grayed out at the bottom of the page when I saw it.

Re: Why I’m Learning Perl 6

#70

> Concurrency is hard and if you want M:N thread multiplexing (i.e. WEB SCALE CODE, where application threads aren’t pinned to pthreads) your options today are precisely Erlang, Go, .NET, and Perl 6. Putting aside the "web scale" jokes ( http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ ), this statement is still absurd. Every major language, or at least the ones that matter for backend development, has support for thread multipl…

> Every major language, or at least the ones that matter for backend development, has support for thread multiplexing / coroutines / fibers, whatever.

M:N threading is not, from a developer perspective, the same thing as coroutines/fibers. Coroutines are lower-level; it's possible to build something like M:N threading on top of coroutines, but it means doing a lot of work that's already done for you in a language that provides M:N threading out of the box, and if you have to do it yourself, that also means code you use from others isn't going to integrate well with it generally.

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