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Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

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Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#91

Post by theOnliest »

perlgeek wrote: post #80
DougHaber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me for this, but why is it still called Perl 6? I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl. I fully support the development of Perl 6, but I really wish the name would change to somethi…

> I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl. It's both, really. If you use it (and after a while of getting used it), it just feels like perl. > I fully support the development of Perl 6, but…

> Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder its evolution in the upcoming decades.

I'm wondering which unsolved problems you're referring to in particular. (Surely Perl 5 is not the only language which might happen on problems in upcoming decades, and just as surely Perl 6 isn't immune to them.)

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#92

Post by perlgeek »

DougHaber wrote: post #89
perlgeek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl. It's both, really. If you use it (and after a while of getting used it), it just feels like perl. > I fully support the development of Perl 6, but…

> And the "Perl" brand is still very strong, so we are loath to give it up. That is great for you as a Perl 6 developer that gets extra attention for the new language by leveraging the Perl brand, but it is absolutely awful for people in the Perl 5 community. Perl 6 gets free press, but Perl 5 gets mocked and public opinion turns even further against it. > Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder i…

> That is great for you as a Perl 6 developer that gets extra attention for the new language by leveraging the Perl brand, but it is absolutely awful for people in the Perl 5 community. Perl 6 gets free press, but Perl 5 gets mocked and public opinion turns even further against it.

First of all, the press for Perl 6 isn't free at all. We get press because we do cool stuff with programming languages. So do the Rust and Nim communities, for example. Please don't downplay our effort. And the comments are full of prejudice against Perl 6 that is rooted in its Perl 5 legacy; so it's not "free" in a second dimension.

Second, in my experience, Perl 6 is only a small part of the ridicule. Mostly it's about Perl being aweful to read (for which Perl 6 bears no blame at all), lousy code quality, unfamiliar looks through sigils, and so on.

> You refer to "unsolved problems" and while I'm sure there are from your perspective, from mine as someone who writes large Perl 5 applications, there are no great issues

Have you ever asked yourself if this is actually true? Would your work be much easier if you had sane threading in some scenarios? Subroutine and method signatures? never had to deal with the bloat that comes from different libraries using different object systems?

I also happen to work on big Perl 5 code bases for money, and with the knowledge of what's possible in a perlish language, I regularly identify pain points that in the end are rooted in missing or deficient language features.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#93

Post by perlgeek »

theOnliest wrote: post #91
perlgeek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl. It's both, really. If you use it (and after a while of getting used it), it just feels like perl. > I fully support the development of Perl 6, but…

> Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder its evolution in the upcoming decades. I'm wondering which unsolved problems you're referring to in particular. (Surely Perl 5 is not the only language which might happen on problems in upcoming decades , and just as surely Perl 6 isn't immune to them.)

Here are a few:

* way too many globals in the language, making any sane threading support very hard

* OO (or lack thereof) in core. Yes, there are nice OO modules out there (Moose/Moo), but it's easy to land in a situation where you have several OO modules in the same project. Also, many built-ins still only deal in strings (example: error messages), not objects.

* lack of proper subroutine signatures. The ones in 5.20 are a step in the right direction, but still far away from anything that the competing languages offer

* high exposure of internals to the XS (C) API make it nearly impossible to do substantial rewrites of the internals

* The regex syntax has been extended way beyond its limits of sane extensibility. Yes, Perl 5 now has named captures, re-usable(ish) subrules and all that neat stuff, but the syntax is so arcane that I have to look it up every single time I use it.

* Poor type system. Perl 5's types (scalar, list, hash, code, type glob) simply aren't enough in world where you have to distinguish binary data and Unicode strings, for example. Or subroutines and methods.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#94

Post by themgt »

brrt wrote: post #67
chromatic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say potato, I say "Parrot was designed to implement the semantics of both Perl 5 and Rakudo in the same process." You say "It's better to build a specialized VM", I say "Emscripten, Clojure, Niecza, Truffle, and Jakudo."

Well, that's a good point, really. The JVM and the CLR do run many (dynamic) languages quite efficiently. On the other hand, that is in no small part due to the man-centuries spent trying to optimise both the JVM JIT and the language-to-JVM compiler. And as a counter-example, luajit2 was built by one man (mostly) over the course of a few years, and runs very efficiently indeed, in no small part due to the lua-specifi…

Thanks, I think this basic "you go to code with the developer resources you have, not the developer resources you might want or wish to have at a later time" is desperately under-appreciated in software architecture

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#95

Post by perlgeek »

xiaq wrote: post #46
perlgeek wrote: post #40

I'm a Perl 6 core developer (compiler, test suite, docs, design documents, infrastructure). Ask me anything :-)

IIRC the new VM (MoarVM) is around for quite a short time and it replaced Parrot in a dramatically short time. What are the advantages of MoarVM over Parrot and why were we stuck at Parrot for so long before giving it up?

> What are the advantages of MoarVM over Parrot

Mostly that MoarVM developers could learn from all of Parrot's successes and mistakes, while not carrying any of the historical baggage. That means cleaner design, less memory footprint, faster execution.

> and why were we stuck at Parrot for so long before giving it up?

Rakudo works on Parrot. Why drop support for it?

Once you frame the question that way, the answer becomes obvious: because there hasn't been big changes to the code generation yet that would make continued parrot support painful. Once we reach that point, the situation will be reconsidered.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#96

Post by ars »

perlgeek wrote: post #40

I'm a Perl 6 core developer (compiler, test suite, docs, design documents, infrastructure). Ask me anything :-)

What are the risks still left? What things might happen/not happen that would prevent release on this schedule?

Or in other words what is still left to do that is not just routine work, but actually might not be possible (or not possible in the timeframe)?

Or in even more informal language, what's the holdup? :)

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#97

Post by DonHopkins »

sigzero wrote: post #42
DonHopkins wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"most of the other languages were modeled on it." Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl". "Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl? >Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Perl's time was 15 years ago. >"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages." A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's libra…

> A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's library ecosystem is more comprehensive than Perl's language. Because most any language minus all of its libraries is less "comprehensive" than another language's libraries, simply because most mature library ecosystems are much more massive than the language itself. That doesn't even make sense.

What he said, "Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages", doesn't make sense, because he's comparing a "library" to "languages": apples and oranges.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#98

Post by DonHopkins »

kbenson wrote: post #36
DonHopkins wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"most of the other languages were modeled on it." Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl". "Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl? >Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time. Perl's time was 15 years ago. >"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages." A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's libra…

>>"most of the other languages were modeled on it." >Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl". I don't know about most , but both PHP and Ruby were heavily influenced by Perl. If you've used both, this should be apparent, if not, you can easily find references on record to the effect. The original statement may have been a bit hyperbolic, but in context and with constraints something similar is…

It's true that most popular scripting languages today were influenced by the same scripting (and other types of) languages that Perl was influenced by. Namely shell scripting and Lisp.

What I object to are the terms "most" and "modeled on", each of which are hyperbolic, but taken together are "hyperbolic squared" (to stretch the mathematical metaphor).

And Perl 6 hasn't had much influence at all, since nobody's been able to use it for anything practical in the last 15 years.

At best, Perl 6 has influenced people to learn other languages than Perl, which is a good thing, I suppose.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#99

Post by DougHaber »

perlgeek wrote: post #92
DougHaber wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the "Perl" brand is still very strong, so we are loath to give it up. That is great for you as a Perl 6 developer that gets extra attention for the new language by leveraging the Perl brand, but it is absolutely awful for people in the Perl 5 community. Perl 6 gets free press, but Perl 5 gets mocked and public opinion turns even further against it. > Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder i…

> That is great for you as a Perl 6 developer that gets extra attention for the new language by leveraging the Perl brand, but it is absolutely awful for people in the Perl 5 community. Perl 6 gets free press, but Perl 5 gets mocked and public opinion turns even further against it. First of all, the press for Perl 6 isn't free at all. We get press because we do cool stuff with programming languages. So do the Rust an…

Sorry if anything has come off as being too argumentative. I just feel like you are downplaying the large impact that Perl 6 has had on Perl 5 and the public perception of Perl, and the impact that will come when a 1.0 version is officially released. With the new release coming up this may be the last opportunity to avoid the future damage, and that is what my question revolves around. As for everything else, we are really on the same side and I agree with you on the notable points, so I will leave out further discussion.

I am looking forward to the future of Perl 6. I really do like some of the things I've seen going on there, and it is fairly likely that in the future I will be happily writing Perl 6 code on some projects. With that said, I am very concerned about how Perl 6 carrying the Perl name will impact Perl 5, but that is separate from my excitement that a new more modern language will be carrying forward some of the Perl styles.

In short, I do appreciate Perl 6 and I don't mean to downplay anything going on there, but my concern is about what it all means for Perl 5.

Re: Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

#100

Post by wolfgke »

caoilte wrote: post #73
bonif wrote: post #48

I got my first job in 2000 because I knew Perl. Perl 6 was coming. Fast forward .. 15 years have passed.. Please stop insulting us ...

Give them a chance. Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually, after all.

But not GNU Hurd.
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