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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

#61

Post by resonantjacket5 »

rollschild wrote: post #39

I 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.

Assuming you mean rename the next version of a programming language — I think that’s a horrible idea. The entire point of continuing with the previous name is that eventually the community will move onto the new language. I’m guessing Perl 6 made too many incompatible changes from Perl 5 though I don’t know much about them.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#62

Post by vinceguidry »

eranima wrote: post #29
vinceguidry wrote: post #27

This should have happened with Python 2/3.

Perl 6 is WAY more different than Perl 5. Python 3 absolutely should not have been renamed.

Well right now I avoid using any tool written in python that doesn't have os-level packages because there still isn't a clean way to use python repos without deep understanding of how python works.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#63

Post by DonHopkins »

rubinelli wrote: post #34
smacktoward wrote: post #9

Fifteen 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.

Yeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#64

Post by rollschild »

BowBun wrote: post #56
rollschild wrote: post #39

I 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.

I meant popularity wise.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#65

Post by proverbialbunny »

make3 wrote: post #35
gillesjacobs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic language technology research.

.. in the old guard of language technology research I guess, because in my NLP lab, no one knows the first thing about Perl (everything is done in Python)

More than that. I wrote my first machine learning project in Perl.

Perl 5 is better than Python in many ways, but worse in other ways. Raku seems to have none of the downsides Perl 5 had, but all of the upsides. Raku looks like it could be a valid replacement for Python in the ML space.

Also, back then, Perl 5 had better libraries than Python. Though, that was quite a while ago.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#66

Post by eddyg »

rollschild wrote: post #39

I 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.

What do you mean? Perl6/Raku has some great features that make it much better than Python. In addition to no GIL, there's other advantages, like discussed here: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thron... and https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html

The features demonstrated in this talk are worth a watch (or at least a scroll through the slide deck): http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#67

Post by ttkciar »

jolmg wrote: post #46
Ovid wrote: post #2

This 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…

> Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way. I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.

Since the language-previously-known-as-Perl6 will be known as Raku, there shouldn't be any conflict with Perl v6

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#68

Post by lilSebastian »

7thaccount wrote: post #59
rubinelli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See the section about waiting for perl 6 before doing more work...

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-ren...

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#69

Post by Grinnz »

peterangular wrote: post #42
yellowapple wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes Perl is that tool, and thus sometimes I'll still use Perl.

Genuinely curious - and not trying to be a jerk... but where do you find Perl fits well? I can only imagine needing it if I'm stuck on a legacy OS/strictly governed environment where it's the only option I have. (ie: governmental work etc.)

Oneliners that range from simple text processing to complex magic. Wonderful web applications in Mojolicious. Lexical scoping and strict variable checking. Four strong event loop ecosystems, futures and promises, and an in development async/await syntax all for collaborating asynchronous tasks. Great integration with shared libraries through XS and FFI. A consistent culture of documentation and testing for everything on CPAN. And mainly, familiarity with the language.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#70

Post by zzzcpan »

tombert wrote: post #45
lliamander wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

For that matter, Erlang has been around for like almost 30 years and has had multicore support since 2007, and has always been dynamic.

In fact Elixir and Erlang are the only reasonably known dynamic languages that differentiate on concurrency. The rest either do higher order event loop concurrency, which is ok, but not a differentiator, or do worse, shared memory multithreading (threads, coroutines with synchronous channels, mutexes, etc.)
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