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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

#91

Post by proverbialbunny »

ram_rar wrote: post #5

Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?

Raku excels at slicing and dicing input data. So, if you need to read from a database or a csv or anything similar, Raku is amazing at taking that data and converting it into the format to do processing on.

Not only that, but when Perl 5 was at the end of its life, comparing its libraries to both Python and Ruby, you'd often find the best library was for Perl.

Raku should be far faster than Python and Ruby and may in the future have better libraries with excellent concurrency support, making it a good choice to do processing over the data, not just converting it to the format you need. It has an easy interface with C and C++, so you can import libraries from there too, if you need more speed.

Before Python came to fame Perl was primarily used by two groups: 1) sys admins who needed bash style 1 liners, but in a cleaner language (This is where the dirty code stereotype comes from.) and 2) Web devs. Much of the early pre PHP internet and even post PHP internet was written in Perl. When Perl on hiatus the web world turned into this mess of frameworks like it is today. It used to be a more unified world.

And then there is the rare 3rd group. I worked on earlier ML projects in Perl before Python was a thing. I enjoyed Perl more than Python and so did the people around me. Moving to Python / R was somewhat painful knowing it could have been better. I hope Raku takes up this torch and is good as it appears to be.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#92

Post by __jal »

goatinaboat wrote: post #32
peterangular wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the compa…

It’s the Perl culture, to do even simple things in the weirdest way possible and everyone will call you a wizard. Whereas the Python community praises complex ideas expressed as simple code and frowns on tricks. That’s why all but the the most obsessive have moved on. And from what I’ve seen Perl 6 takes it to the next level.

You pretty clearly have very little familiarity with "Perl culture" and even less with Perl6/Raku.

Perl 5 is in decline, no doubt. But it isn't because whomever you're visualizing when you wrote the above is an annoying nerd. People can and do disagree on the 'why'; I personally think it is the general decline of Unix-style syntax combined with the natural ebb and flow of language evolution.

If "what you've seen" is watching the compiler developers work through language design, the origin of your misconception at least makes a little sense, even if that's obviously a weird, unfair basis.

By all means, hate on perlmonks.org if you like. Just don't spread insulting nonsense.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#93

Post by StevePerkins »

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.

Perl 5 was released in 1994. At this point, the "5" isn't really a version number anymore. It's just part of the name.

If you did a "major version bump" from here, you'd probably have to bring the "5" along for the ride. Like Java version 2, where you had J2EE version for years.

In reality, there probably never will be another major version bump of Perl 5, in the marketing sense. The minor version number is really the major version number now.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#94

Post by tvaughan »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #33

From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music"). Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

And back when we had to read books to learn a language, the definitive guide on Perl was called "the camel book." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Perl

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#95

Post by dana321 »

peterangular wrote: post #6
bifrost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious. Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5. FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the compa…

I would rather deal with that than a project with millions of classes which are mostly empty full of useless comments that tell you nothing about how the project is put together.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#96

Post by jandrese »

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.

That would be an issue, but I don't think there is an appetite for a new major version of Perl at this point.

To avoid confusion they would probably break the version convention entirely and name it with the year instead. So instead of Perl6 it would be Perl'19.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#97

Post by ttkciar »

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)

We don't have an "NLP lab" here, but when my project required NLP solutions, perl delivered quite nicely.

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#98

Post by Grinnz »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #33

From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music"). Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

It is also a type of Japanese pottery. "Raku pottery is "imperfect but sophisticated", so that's a fit :)" https://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/perl6?date=2018-...

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#99

Post by lilSebastian »

Grinnz wrote: post #74
notyourday wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Would I write an API in perl? Nope. I see you have not tried Mojolicious.

Mojo makes all web based work almost effortless. Many thanks to you and the other contributors

Re: Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

#100

Post by DonHopkins »

kazinator wrote: post #36
peterangular wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs. Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the compa…

> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. Oh man, in 1996 I was at Nortel. Some Ms. C. in Computer Science (no longer with the company) left behind Perl cruft whose indentation levels didn't even match up: whatever { } type of thing. He didn't know how to operate a programmer's text editor.

The Broken Windows Theory may be bullshit when it comes to criminology, but I truly believe it applies to code.

I've seen a lot of negligently written code with broken windows on the surface, that deep down turns out to be criminally insane.

If somebody's doesn't give a shit enough to indent their code, they usually don't give a shit enough to design it either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

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