5 ms·

Too little, too late, IMO. The world has moved to Ruby and Go for the web/cloud and Python for data analysis/scientific computing.

Ulti 11y ago
Ruby and Go for the web?? Really? Not JavaScript and PHP (still). Python is old hat too it's all about Julia now :P and R is making a come back in some weird computing renaissance.
- benbristow 11y ago
  Ruby is very popular with the excellent Rails framework. Also Sinatra as a DSL if the power of Rails isn't needed.
  - b2gills 11y ago
    Imagine what DSL would look like in a programming language that is itself defined as several DSLs. That is signatures, immediate strings, regular expressions are all separate domain specific languages that share parts of the same grammar but with certain domain specific modifications. There is a thing called a Slang where you can replace the Perl 6 grammar with a different one entirely. So you could write a Ruby slang and write Ruby in Perl 6. Unfortunately the design for slangs wasn't quite good enough yet for the Christmas release of ROAST the specification testsuite.
noblethrasher 11y ago
Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby. WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME. JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml. iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language. This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.
- draw_down 11y ago
  The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for fifteen years.
  - noblethrasher 11y ago
    Perl is still among the top 10 languages, according to TIOBE. Even if we discount that index, other indices have it in at least the top fifteen. https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present , for example.
    - draw_down 11y ago
      I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already. I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.
      - JadeNB 11y ago
        > I just don't see why that means people will use it. I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations. > The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already. The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!
zoffix222 11y ago
The 20-year-old Ruby and Python were brand new at some point in time too. It's a bit silly to declare the current crop of languages to be with us forever. I can already notice where being a brand new language makes Perl 6 address new inventions in the past 20 years much better: superb Unicode support and getting concurrency by simply using .hyper/.race methods, not to mention grammars and autothreaded junctions. This looks pretty revolutionary to me.
EugeneOZ 11y ago
Few hipsters is not a "world", world is much bigger.

Ulti 11y ago

Ruby and Go for the web?? Really? Not JavaScript and PHP (still). Python is old hat too it's all about Julia now :P and R is making a come back in some weird computing renaissance.

benbristow 11y ago
Ruby is very popular with the excellent Rails framework. Also Sinatra as a DSL if the power of Rails isn't needed.
- b2gills 11y ago
  Imagine what DSL would look like in a programming language that is itself defined as several DSLs. That is signatures, immediate strings, regular expressions are all separate domain specific languages that share parts of the same grammar but with certain domain specific modifications. There is a thing called a Slang where you can replace the Perl 6 grammar with a different one entirely. So you could write a Ruby slang and write Ruby in Perl 6. Unfortunately the design for slangs wasn't quite good enough yet for the Christmas release of ROAST the specification testsuite.

noblethrasher 11y ago

Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby. WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME. JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml. iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language. This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

draw_down 11y ago
The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for fifteen years.
- noblethrasher 11y ago
  Perl is still among the top 10 languages, according to TIOBE. Even if we discount that index, other indices have it in at least the top fifteen. https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages
- JadeNB 11y ago
  As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present , for example.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already. I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.
    - JadeNB 11y ago
      > I just don't see why that means people will use it. I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations. > The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already. The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!

zoffix222 11y ago

The 20-year-old Ruby and Python were brand new at some point in time too. It's a bit silly to declare the current crop of languages to be with us forever. I can already notice where being a brand new language makes Perl 6 address new inventions in the past 20 years much better: superb Unicode support and getting concurrency by simply using .hyper/.race methods, not to mention grammars and autothreaded junctions. This looks pretty revolutionary to me.

EugeneOZ 11y ago

Few hipsters is not a "world", world is much bigger.