10 ms·

Perl 6 is fun

194 points by kamaal 11y ago

xlm1717 11y ago
I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release a lot of people are starting to go back to it and having fun with it again. And like the author mentions, they improved on a lot of things with perl 6.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  > Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the majority of their career. Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or haskell.
  - AndyNemmity 11y ago
    We used to make our living writing perl, but many of us moved on to python after so many missteps in release of perl 6. The question to me is, is there a reason to go back to perl? I don't know the answer.
    - hahainternet 11y ago
      Every single annoyance you can find with Python seems thoroughly addressed. Try it and see. Let someone know if there's still major pain points and the #perl6 community would love to hear it.
      - logicallee 11y ago
        joke's on you, I don't have a single annoyance in Python.
        hahainternet 11y ago
        You mix in some classes. One of those classes overwrites a method from another. How will you know? There you go. Now you do have an annoyance with Python.
        kbenson 11y ago
        I wouldn't consider that a good thing. No language is perfect, so if you have no annoyances with a language, you either don't know the language well enough, aren't doing anything interesting enough to run into the annoyances, or lack enough experience in other languages to know what could be better. But I know you're just being flippant. ;)
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed. Anyway, that is my little digression.
    - nickysielicki 11y ago
      I don't think so. Companies don't employ sysadmins because they need them to do anything particularly novel that the software engineers couldn't do themselves, they hire them for the liability they provide, and the capability to poke into the running system and figure out what's going on. I don't see unikernels or docker or whatever sufficiently advanced software you're referring to replacing that.
    - cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
      >The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. This is probably the most arrogant statement I've heard on Hacker News as somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat. "Obstructionism" is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities of the hardware by their VMs and containers call "due diligence". As a sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other line of business applications that make the company money. That is what I am hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks. So a little due diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs. The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show "complete lack of discipline" is also a testament to the "ooh, shiny!" mentality of many engineers. We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you scribbling out report files? We have an automated system for dealing with system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-standard way? Remember, by the time I see your code it's too late - it's already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running. Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about "obstruction" and "inconsistency". I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should spend some time looking in the mirror.
- latenightcoding 11y ago
  > Fun don't pay the bills though Not true at all. Thanks to perl I have been working high paying jobs from home since I was 19. And I always get banks or other big companies contacting me because they need a UNIX/Perl programmer or a sysadmin
doktrin 11y ago
Naive question time. Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be looking into? This may be inflammatory, but it's my earnest impression : as an outsider, I really don't like how Perl's versioning was handled (5 vs. 6). On top of being unnecessarily confusing, it also gives an impression of complete mismanagement - fair or not. With so many languages out there to choose from, what sets Perl 6 apart from other modern languages and ecosystems?
- bcoates 11y ago
  Don't know much about the rest of the language, but the Perl 6 regexes are a big improvement and I hope they take over as the conventional syntax in the world outside of Perl.
  - giaour 11y ago
    What appeals to you about the new regex system? Is it a new syntax or an expanded feature set?
    - grondilu 11y ago
      It's a completely new syntax, though a few elements are identical (quantifiers for instance are similar). It tries to be more readable and intuitive. The regex system is also part of grammars, which did not exist natively in Perl 5.
    - fancy_pantser 11y ago
      They're probably talking about the new "rules" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  What exactly don't you like about the way they did the versioning? Do you prefer what python did? Python 2 vs. Python 3 is a complete and utter mess. Perl, which exists mostly in the same use case, shouldn't have any of those problems.
autarch 11y ago
Author here. I appreciate the traffic but my server doesn't. I'm working on getting this viewable again.
- landr0id 11y ago
  Want to put an archive.is link up to lighten the load?
  - autarch 11y ago
    https://archive.is/UudBe https://archive.is/UudBe
autarch 11y ago
See https://archive.is/UudBe https://archive.is/UudBe for a cached version until my server stops blowing up.
atrust 11y ago
I loved Perl 5. Now when Perl 6 is out, I'm a bit confused about versioning. As far as I understand, perl 6 files are of .pl6 extension. Why would that be different from regular .pl, giving that it's just a new version of a language? I mean, I have never seen things like .js5, .php6, etc. Next, is `use v6;` mandatory? Quite confusing. Am I allowed to do `use v2;`?
- zoffix222 11y ago
  Your confusion lies in thinking, as you've said, "just a new version of a language." It's actually been a long, 15-year journey that resulted in a completely brand new language. The name is still 'Perl 6' for historical reasons, but it may as well be called 'Rakudo'; something people've not heard of yet. The Perl 5 language is still being developed and improved, with a major release every year. Hence, the filename distinction. However, it's just a convention. You can have any extension you like (at least on *nix). And to answer your question, no "use v6" is not mandatory. It's there so if you run your script with a perl (and not perl6) interpreter, you won't get confusing errors.
  - atrust 11y ago
    Of course one can have any extension. Not that it's a bad thing to use .p6. I was just trying to make it clear for myself to understand how beneficial the new extension is. Part of that lies in "marketing" the language. Old school engineers may still want to use .pl, whereas newbies will follow the documentation and have their files prefixed with .p6. My worry is that such behavior may lead to a confusion in Open Source world and push away newcomers from using the language. I've been following the journey for, more or less, the past 10 years. I hope that whoever spent those 15 years on developing Perl 6, will reap the rewards.
    - sigzero 11y ago
      Most of the modules I have seen are using .pm6 and .pl6.
      - 11y ago
_pmf_ 11y ago
(I just asked on stackoverflow, but I'l try here again:) Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based, I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM, but could not find anything. Does someone know whether this is possible?
- cygx 11y ago
  Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based The JVM is just one of the backends, but it's fallen a bit by the wayside during the current effort to get 6.0 out on MoarVM. I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM There is, but I'm unaware of proper documentation. For now, you might want to take a look at https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/t/03-jvm/01-interop.t https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/t/03-jvm/01-intero...
  - _pmf_ 11y ago
    Ah, thanks for clearing this up!
- kbenson 11y ago
  Rakudo isn't JVM "based", but the JVM is one VM that it targets (also MoarVM, and Parrot. I imagine at some point the .Net CLR will be added). That said, take a look at this[1]. 1: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-perl-6-on-the-jvm/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-p...
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    There was Parrot support, but AFAIK its been dead since February.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      Fair enough. I struggled with how to denote my uncertainty with Parrot's status without implying it was deprecated if it wasn't, so I settled with just including it without any qualifiers.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
One question I haven't seen asked in this particular thread is, can it be used in production? What type of ecosystem is available (something like CPAN) for Perl 6 and how reliable is it? Two questions I suppose, but I guess the first one is more important. Edit: What I really mean by "can it be used in production" is really: is anyone using it in production and what is their experience with it and their recommendations?
- justinator 11y ago
  I think we're all waiting with baited breath for Perl 6.Stable to be released. Hopefully that'll be around Perl 6.Christmas. For now, it's fun to see what the future will bring. I'm excited.
  - jjn1056 11y ago
    I'm totally not waiting. This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' It wasn't all those years ago, and won't be in Jan 2016 either. No jobs, no deep libraries, no SDK support... The list is unending. If we'd put 1/10 the time into minor improvements to perl5 over the past 15 years we'd have most of what people seem to like about Perl6 in a language you can actually get a job. Instead we have two languages with no future instead of one...
    - giancarlostoro 11y ago
      Somewhat the same problem with Python as well. I really would like to see Perl 6 become a standard, I guess craigslist uses Perl 6 if anything now that I think about it.
    - justinator 11y ago
      > This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' I'm curious, what exactly are you talking about?
      - cygx 11y ago
pearjuice 11y ago
>Perl >fun Pick one and choose wisely.
unixhero 11y ago
Am I the only one to have noticed? PERL is a shuffling of REPL
- justinator 11y ago
  This is a bit pedantic, but you wouldn't write about Perl in all caps, as it's not actually an acronym (but it is a backronym) http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-difference-between-%22perl%22-and-%22Perl%22%3F http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-differenc... Welcome to the Perl subculture!
  - unixhero 11y ago
    Not pedantic enough. You didn't comment on Perl being a backronym for REPL! I can't find anything out there about this either. It must therefore only be me :). >Welcome to the Perl subculture! I was at the time also in the Slackware subculture, Church of the subgenious. It got very foobar. Tried learning Perl since highschool, it was too much of a mindF* for me to get going with. chomp? regex! Phew. Maybe with Perl6, it's time.
wodenokoto 11y ago
How is Perl6 overcoming the problems that python3 is facing in moving people over from one version to the next?
- MadcapJake 11y ago
  The situation is really quite different. Perl 6 is a sister language, Perl 5 is still quite actively being developed, and the wait has certainly made many hesitant to begin upgrading. One thing to keep in mind is that Python 2 is just now finally starting to wane, so I am guessing that if Perl 5 does end up going the way of Python 2, it won't be for quite some time.

194 points by kamaal 11y ago

I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release a lot of people are starting to go back to it and having fun with it again. And like the author mentions, they improved on a lot of things with perl 6.

nickysielicki 11y ago
> Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the majority of their career. Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or haskell.
- AndyNemmity 11y ago
  We used to make our living writing perl, but many of us moved on to python after so many missteps in release of perl 6. The question to me is, is there a reason to go back to perl? I don't know the answer.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    Every single annoyance you can find with Python seems thoroughly addressed. Try it and see. Let someone know if there's still major pain points and the #perl6 community would love to hear it.
    - logicallee 11y ago
      joke's on you, I don't have a single annoyance in Python.
      - hahainternet 11y ago
        You mix in some classes. One of those classes overwrites a method from another. How will you know? There you go. Now you do have an annoyance with Python.
      - kbenson 11y ago
        I wouldn't consider that a good thing. No language is perfect, so if you have no annoyances with a language, you either don't know the language well enough, aren't doing anything interesting enough to run into the annoyances, or lack enough experience in other languages to know what could be better. But I know you're just being flippant. ;)
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed. Anyway, that is my little digression.
  - nickysielicki 11y ago
    I don't think so. Companies don't employ sysadmins because they need them to do anything particularly novel that the software engineers couldn't do themselves, they hire them for the liability they provide, and the capability to poke into the running system and figure out what's going on. I don't see unikernels or docker or whatever sufficiently advanced software you're referring to replacing that.
  - cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
    >The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. This is probably the most arrogant statement I've heard on Hacker News as somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat. "Obstructionism" is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities of the hardware by their VMs and containers call "due diligence". As a sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other line of business applications that make the company money. That is what I am hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks. So a little due diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs. The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show "complete lack of discipline" is also a testament to the "ooh, shiny!" mentality of many engineers. We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you scribbling out report files? We have an automated system for dealing with system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-standard way? Remember, by the time I see your code it's too late - it's already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running. Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about "obstruction" and "inconsistency". I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should spend some time looking in the mirror.
latenightcoding 11y ago
> Fun don't pay the bills though Not true at all. Thanks to perl I have been working high paying jobs from home since I was 19. And I always get banks or other big companies contacting me because they need a UNIX/Perl programmer or a sysadmin

doktrin 11y ago

Naive question time. Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be looking into? This may be inflammatory, but it's my earnest impression : as an outsider, I really don't like how Perl's versioning was handled (5 vs. 6). On top of being unnecessarily confusing, it also gives an impression of complete mismanagement - fair or not. With so many languages out there to choose from, what sets Perl 6 apart from other modern languages and ecosystems?

bcoates 11y ago
Don't know much about the rest of the language, but the Perl 6 regexes are a big improvement and I hope they take over as the conventional syntax in the world outside of Perl.
- giaour 11y ago
  What appeals to you about the new regex system? Is it a new syntax or an expanded feature set?
  - grondilu 11y ago
    It's a completely new syntax, though a few elements are identical (quantifiers for instance are similar). It tries to be more readable and intuitive. The regex system is also part of grammars, which did not exist natively in Perl 5.
  - fancy_pantser 11y ago
    They're probably talking about the new "rules" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules
nickysielicki 11y ago
What exactly don't you like about the way they did the versioning? Do you prefer what python did? Python 2 vs. Python 3 is a complete and utter mess. Perl, which exists mostly in the same use case, shouldn't have any of those problems.

autarch 11y ago

Author here. I appreciate the traffic but my server doesn't. I'm working on getting this viewable again.

landr0id 11y ago
Want to put an archive.is link up to lighten the load?
- autarch 11y ago
  https://archive.is/UudBe https://archive.is/UudBe

autarch 11y ago

See https://archive.is/UudBe https://archive.is/UudBe for a cached version until my server stops blowing up.

atrust 11y ago

I loved Perl 5. Now when Perl 6 is out, I'm a bit confused about versioning. As far as I understand, perl 6 files are of .pl6 extension. Why would that be different from regular .pl, giving that it's just a new version of a language? I mean, I have never seen things like .js5, .php6, etc. Next, is `use v6;` mandatory? Quite confusing. Am I allowed to do `use v2;`?

zoffix222 11y ago
Your confusion lies in thinking, as you've said, "just a new version of a language." It's actually been a long, 15-year journey that resulted in a completely brand new language. The name is still 'Perl 6' for historical reasons, but it may as well be called 'Rakudo'; something people've not heard of yet. The Perl 5 language is still being developed and improved, with a major release every year. Hence, the filename distinction. However, it's just a convention. You can have any extension you like (at least on *nix). And to answer your question, no "use v6" is not mandatory. It's there so if you run your script with a perl (and not perl6) interpreter, you won't get confusing errors.
- atrust 11y ago
  Of course one can have any extension. Not that it's a bad thing to use .p6. I was just trying to make it clear for myself to understand how beneficial the new extension is. Part of that lies in "marketing" the language. Old school engineers may still want to use .pl, whereas newbies will follow the documentation and have their files prefixed with .p6. My worry is that such behavior may lead to a confusion in Open Source world and push away newcomers from using the language. I've been following the journey for, more or less, the past 10 years. I hope that whoever spent those 15 years on developing Perl 6, will reap the rewards.
  - sigzero 11y ago
    Most of the modules I have seen are using .pm6 and .pl6.
    - 11y ago

_pmf_ 11y ago

(I just asked on stackoverflow, but I'l try here again:) Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based, I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM, but could not find anything. Does someone know whether this is possible?

cygx 11y ago
Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based The JVM is just one of the backends, but it's fallen a bit by the wayside during the current effort to get 6.0 out on MoarVM. I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM There is, but I'm unaware of proper documentation. For now, you might want to take a look at https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/t/03-jvm/01-interop.t https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/t/03-jvm/01-intero...
- _pmf_ 11y ago
  Ah, thanks for clearing this up!
kbenson 11y ago
Rakudo isn't JVM "based", but the JVM is one VM that it targets (also MoarVM, and Parrot. I imagine at some point the .Net CLR will be added). That said, take a look at this[1]. 1: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-perl-6-on-the-jvm/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-p...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  There was Parrot support, but AFAIK its been dead since February.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Fair enough. I struggled with how to denote my uncertainty with Parrot's status without implying it was deprecated if it wasn't, so I settled with just including it without any qualifiers.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

One question I haven't seen asked in this particular thread is, can it be used in production? What type of ecosystem is available (something like CPAN) for Perl 6 and how reliable is it? Two questions I suppose, but I guess the first one is more important. Edit: What I really mean by "can it be used in production" is really: is anyone using it in production and what is their experience with it and their recommendations?

justinator 11y ago
I think we're all waiting with baited breath for Perl 6.Stable to be released. Hopefully that'll be around Perl 6.Christmas. For now, it's fun to see what the future will bring. I'm excited.
- jjn1056 11y ago
  I'm totally not waiting. This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' It wasn't all those years ago, and won't be in Jan 2016 either. No jobs, no deep libraries, no SDK support... The list is unending. If we'd put 1/10 the time into minor improvements to perl5 over the past 15 years we'd have most of what people seem to like about Perl6 in a language you can actually get a job. Instead we have two languages with no future instead of one...
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    Somewhat the same problem with Python as well. I really would like to see Perl 6 become a standard, I guess craigslist uses Perl 6 if anything now that I think about it.
  - justinator 11y ago
    > This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' I'm curious, what exactly are you talking about?
    - cygx 11y ago

pearjuice 11y ago

>Perl >fun Pick one and choose wisely.

unixhero 11y ago

Am I the only one to have noticed? PERL is a shuffling of REPL

justinator 11y ago
This is a bit pedantic, but you wouldn't write about Perl in all caps, as it's not actually an acronym (but it is a backronym) http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-difference-between-%22perl%22-and-%22Perl%22%3F http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-differenc... Welcome to the Perl subculture!
- unixhero 11y ago
  Not pedantic enough. You didn't comment on Perl being a backronym for REPL! I can't find anything out there about this either. It must therefore only be me :). >Welcome to the Perl subculture! I was at the time also in the Slackware subculture, Church of the subgenious. It got very foobar. Tried learning Perl since highschool, it was too much of a mindF* for me to get going with. chomp? regex! Phew. Maybe with Perl6, it's time.

wodenokoto 11y ago

How is Perl6 overcoming the problems that python3 is facing in moving people over from one version to the next?

MadcapJake 11y ago
The situation is really quite different. Perl 6 is a sister language, Perl 5 is still quite actively being developed, and the wait has certainly made many hesitant to begin upgrading. One thing to keep in mind is that Python 2 is just now finally starting to wane, so I am guessing that if Perl 5 does end up going the way of Python 2, it won't be for quite some time.