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This is impossibly exciting. Most people don't realize it yet, but it's like a programming language hand grenade just went off in the world...little bits of the
by bane 11y ago
This is impossibly exciting. Most people don't realize it yet, but it's like a programming language hand grenade just went off in the world...little bits of the new paradigms in Perl 6 are going to start winding their way into languages of the future.
I first remember learning about rumors around the development of Perl 6 about the time I picked up Perl 5 for the first time. I had been doing a bunch of C and C++ code (and a smattering of Java) up to that point, but coding in Perl was like hitting the idea accelerator. At the time (programming resources on the Internet were few and far between) I didn't even know where to look to find resources to do things in C++ that were quick one-off scripts in Perl. Need CGI? No problem. Mucking around with a database, here ya go.
I jettisoned C++ and dove heavily into Perl for years after that. I'm pretty sure that Perl made me a much worse programmer (it turns laziness into a kind of opiate), but a better conceptual developer -- I now had a much better idea of what computers could do, and didn't have to reinvent an entire civilization every time I wanted to do something (not a joke, where and when I worked, I was partially responsible for working on a pre-STL String library for C++, that's where we were in the world). Perl was really the first time I had encountered the productivity benefits a true high-level language could bring.
I've since abandoned Perl and have moved onto Python for day-to-day. There's lots of electrons spilled by many former Perlers who've made similar transitions. I've never really liked Python in the same way I liked writing Perl. With Python I've always felt like I'm assembling Tinker Toys or an erector set into a thing. It's quick to build and it works in the end but there's not much passion in it. With Perl I always felt like I was writing poetry -- code just sort of fell out of me.
I thought about checking out Go, but there's something about the sort of terse opinion the language designers have about the language that's made me feel like the entire language is a premature optimization that's going to go stale quick.
Perl 6 feels like we've just entered a new evolutionary period, where we've been given all new tools, where the opinion is careful inclusionism. It's like being stuck writing couplets and haiku in Perl 5 and now we can write anything.
Congratulations Larry et. al. This has been a long time coming, and I hope this is an amazing start!
- trop 11y agoAll this progression rings true, but also the initial attraction of Perl. Back in the late '90s I used Perl at a job where everyone else worked in C. This was in the days that programmers of compiled languages were skeptical of interpreted languages. One day a friend invited me by where he worked, where the sysadmin was a "real computer guy". The sysadmin turned out to be a man with long hair and a long gray beard. He was using a very thin Sony laptop with Linux and a command-line TTY (he said he'd never bothered to install X-Windows) and after he deployed a new release of the company's code using a single command and started nmap running on the internal network (he wanted to see who else was running a Unix), he asked me what sort of programming I did. I was a bit cowed, and apologetically said that I didn't really program, I only did scripting in Perl. He looked at me in the eye for the first time and said, "Perl is most bodaciously a real programming language." Seeing Perl 6 release notes like "Use of EVAL now requires a declaration of ‘use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL’" and "Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value" reminds me of the nerd coolness of Perl, so different from the straightforward sensible air of Python. I don't see many deep-hacker sysadmins these days, but I hope the excitement of Perl 6 can inspire some inefficiently marvelous coders...
- tracker1 11y agoHaven't looked at perl in quite a while... just seeing your comments on the release notes brings a smile to my eye... as opposed to JS not fixing the text strings to use UTF-8 from UCS16 as it might "break" something... as opposed to all the new and old code that behaves unexpectedly. I always loved how simple it was to do simple things in perl... I've been hoping to find something I need go for, so I can actually dig into it... far more likely to find an excuse to use perl 6 sooner.
- ttflee 11y agoI have trouble learning Python for the past decade, after I learned Perl in order to deal with DNA sequences and BLAST APIs in college. Although its syntax is straight forward, I failed to find any inner feeling to comprehend it.
- 0xFFC 11y agoI thought it is only me. I share exact same experience. After I programmed in Perl for almost 1.5 year.I switched to python for just fun . But I never comprehend deeply whats going on in python like I do in Perl , even though I have written advanced code in python.
- bane 11y agoI've always felt like I hit weird and unexplainable performance walls in Python...my code is either quite fast, or quite slow, and the syntax differences that cause that aren't always clear. With Perl 5, things just sort of chug along at a predictable Perl speed and you could always try to tune certain parts for more speed, but if you didn't bother you had a reasonable idea at how it should perform. Things like this always make me feel like Python is doing things I don't understand.
- lmm 11y agoThat really shouldn't be the case. You get hashtable namespace lookups slowing everything down in either language. Beyond that, there shouldn't be any real barrier. Did you try profiling your Python?