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So what are the answers to these questions? - Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? -

by edem 11y ago

So what are the answers to these questions? - Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? - Is there a need for a new Perl? What is it good for? - What is its business case? - Why in the world would anyone use Perl 6?! If I want to transform my 100.000 line program to a smaller one I won't grab Perl 6 to transform it to 50.000 but I will grab Clojure for example to transform it to an 5.000 one. Is that the only argument for using Perl 6?

pka 11y ago
Well, you can write if 5 < x < 6 for one! Sorry for the sarcasm, but the author hasn't given a single reason beyond some trivial (and inconsequential, imo) syntactic shortcuts and his personal preference for the language.
- rpsw 11y ago
  I know it wasn't your point, but that particular example is just as succinct in Clojure: (< 1 2 3)
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Or in Python 5 < x < 6
hahainternet 11y ago
> If I want to transform my 100.000 line program to a smaller one I won't grab Perl 6 to transform it to 50.000 but I will grab Clojure for example to transform it to an 5.000 one. Is that the only argument for using Perl 6? What a weirdly arrogant and ignorant statement. If you're writing 20x as much code instead of using Clojure, then you're doing some pretty terrible programming. I fail to believe that those 6 points could have been written by someone unbiased. Please show me some Clojure that's 10x more succinct than Perl 6. Otherwise then surely this counts as trolling.
- true_religion 11y ago
  It's funny since the claim I hear most waged against Perl is that... Perl is pretty concise, and at times a little too concise to the point of it being a write-only language.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    Perl is pretty concise, but the list of criticisms above are almost meaningless. Who releases the first version of a language with most of the time spent on the optimiser? Perl 6 loses quite a bit of the Write Only type syntax, and should be very succinct and expressive, but people just type nonsense :(
muraiki 11y ago
That language and compiler distinction is important. For instance, I generally approach developing in Clojure like developing in a dynamic language. I mean, if I want types then I can just use core.typed, right? Things were going great until I used a validation library with HTML form input to check some numeric ranges. Boom: cannot convert java.lang.String to java.lang.Integer. Would the same thing happen in clojurescript? If it obeys js semantics then I won't get an exception, but "200" will become 200 and things will work as expected. If you have a language defined by a test suite that exists separately from your compilers, then perhaps you can avoid these kinds of problems.
- mintplant 11y ago
  I certainly wouldn't trust implicit type conversions for validation code...
perlgeek 11y ago
> - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? People care about distiguishing C89 and C99 from GCC and clang and their versions. If we don't want to block the road to future compilers for the same language (and we had other compilers in the past, they just aren't maintained anymore), we'd better be careful to distinguish them. > - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? Because it's the first stable release, not the last. We expect to improve still.
brudgers 11y ago
I think Clojure is a great language. Using it requires taking dependencies on Java and the JVM or JavaScript and Closure. And those are what throw the exceptions and the context in which exceptions are described [Scala is similar]. That's the cost for the potential speed that comes from developing a new language as an embedded language versus from the ground up. For Clojure's target audience of people who already know Java (or JavaScript) there's a lot of evidence that it was a good decision. Tools like Leiningen can use a familar tree structure and offer the potential benefit of configuration via code in comparison to other Java build tools. But the point of comparison is at a particular level of overhead and that level of overhead is assumed. With ClojureScript, the toolchain is more complicated than a typical JavaScript tool chain. Again that's a tradeoff. Which again, I think Clojure is great. That doesn't mean I think that those tradeoffs are always appropriate. YMMV.
steveklabnik 11y ago
I'm a guy with a Camel tattoo who found Ruby and never went back to Perl, but have followed Perl 6 out of nostalgia. Here's the answers as I understand them: - Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? This is first, a reflection of the playfulness of Perl, and second, a statement about language design. The first release, an alpha, was 6.a. The second, a beta, was 6.b. The third, the actual 'final' release, was 6....c? Since it was being released on Christmas, and 'c' fits, it was decided that releases of Perl 6 would be named after holidays, and they went back and found them for A and B too. As for the statement about language design, I'll add that onto the next one, as it makes more sense in that context. - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? "Perl 6" is a _language_, not an _implementation_. There's a language spec, and any implementation of this spec is a Perl 6. This is a distinction that a lot of projects make, but is a lot fuzzier, because they don't have specs. Consider Ruby: yes, JRuby is also a Ruby, but since there's no language spec, people still assume MRI when you say "Ruby". Perl people don't want you to assume Rakudo when discussing the language itself. This is why there's no minor version of "Perl 6". Language specifications change a lot less frequently than compilers. - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? Like most projects, as long as performance is Good Enough, it's good to get people start using it, and then work on performance after. Especially for a language where performance isn't a main goal, like Perl. As long as you haven't painted yourself into a corner with language decisions, performance improvement is refinement work. - Is there a need for a new Perl? What is it good for? I don't know if there's a _need_, but Perl 6 sure improves on a ton of things about Perl 5. It's the stuff that makes Perl Perl, but turned up to 22, not just 11. The last two are questions I can't really answer.
- johnhayward 11y ago
  > This is first, a reflection of the playfulness of Perl, and second, a statement about language design. The first release, an alpha, was 6.a. The second, a beta, was 6.b. The third, the actual 'final' release, was 6....c? Since it was being released on Christmas, and 'c' fits, it was decided that releases of Perl 6 would be named after holidays, and they went back and found them for A and B too. This sounds absolutely retarded. Back when Perl 5 this kind of hacker clown routine was popular, but now I think most people prefer a bit more simplicity and clarity.
edem 11y ago
For those who did not read the article: these questions are from the article itself! These aren't my questions.
- hahainternet 11y ago
  My apologies. I read it as sarcastically requestioning them.
  - edem 11y ago
    No I was just genuinely curious since I have never used Perl 6 and I wanted to know whether it is worth it to give it a try.
    - hahainternet 11y ago
      It's absolutely worth a try. Please see the fact that there are examples on this very page which are very succinct but hard to do in other languages.

by edem 11y ago

pka 11y ago

Well, you can write if 5 < x < 6 for one! Sorry for the sarcasm, but the author hasn't given a single reason beyond some trivial (and inconsequential, imo) syntactic shortcuts and his personal preference for the language.

rpsw 11y ago
I know it wasn't your point, but that particular example is just as succinct in Clojure: (< 1 2 3)
- masklinn 11y ago
  Or in Python 5 < x < 6

hahainternet 11y ago

> If I want to transform my 100.000 line program to a smaller one I won't grab Perl 6 to transform it to 50.000 but I will grab Clojure for example to transform it to an 5.000 one. Is that the only argument for using Perl 6? What a weirdly arrogant and ignorant statement. If you're writing 20x as much code instead of using Clojure, then you're doing some pretty terrible programming. I fail to believe that those 6 points could have been written by someone unbiased. Please show me some Clojure that's 10x more succinct than Perl 6. Otherwise then surely this counts as trolling.

true_religion 11y ago
It's funny since the claim I hear most waged against Perl is that... Perl is pretty concise, and at times a little too concise to the point of it being a write-only language.
- hahainternet 11y ago
  Perl is pretty concise, but the list of criticisms above are almost meaningless. Who releases the first version of a language with most of the time spent on the optimiser? Perl 6 loses quite a bit of the Write Only type syntax, and should be very succinct and expressive, but people just type nonsense :(

muraiki 11y ago

That language and compiler distinction is important. For instance, I generally approach developing in Clojure like developing in a dynamic language. I mean, if I want types then I can just use core.typed, right? Things were going great until I used a validation library with HTML form input to check some numeric ranges. Boom: cannot convert java.lang.String to java.lang.Integer. Would the same thing happen in clojurescript? If it obeys js semantics then I won't get an exception, but "200" will become 200 and things will work as expected. If you have a language defined by a test suite that exists separately from your compilers, then perhaps you can avoid these kinds of problems.

mintplant 11y ago
I certainly wouldn't trust implicit type conversions for validation code...

perlgeek 11y ago

> - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? People care about distiguishing C89 and C99 from GCC and clang and their versions. If we don't want to block the road to future compilers for the same language (and we had other compilers in the past, they just aren't maintained anymore), we'd better be careful to distinguish them. > - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? Because it's the first stable release, not the last. We expect to improve still.

brudgers 11y ago

I think Clojure is a great language. Using it requires taking dependencies on Java and the JVM or JavaScript and Closure. And those are what throw the exceptions and the context in which exceptions are described [Scala is similar]. That's the cost for the potential speed that comes from developing a new language as an embedded language versus from the ground up. For Clojure's target audience of people who already know Java (or JavaScript) there's a lot of evidence that it was a good decision. Tools like Leiningen can use a familar tree structure and offer the potential benefit of configuration via code in comparison to other Java build tools. But the point of comparison is at a particular level of overhead and that level of overhead is assumed. With ClojureScript, the toolchain is more complicated than a typical JavaScript tool chain. Again that's a tradeoff. Which again, I think Clojure is great. That doesn't mean I think that those tradeoffs are always appropriate. YMMV.

steveklabnik 11y ago

I'm a guy with a Camel tattoo who found Ruby and never went back to Perl, but have followed Perl 6 out of nostalgia. Here's the answers as I understand them: - Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? This is first, a reflection of the playfulness of Perl, and second, a statement about language design. The first release, an alpha, was 6.a. The second, a beta, was 6.b. The third, the actual 'final' release, was 6....c? Since it was being released on Christmas, and 'c' fits, it was decided that releases of Perl 6 would be named after holidays, and they went back and found them for A and B too. As for the statement about language design, I'll add that onto the next one, as it makes more sense in that context. - What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? "Perl 6" is a _language_, not an _implementation_. There's a language spec, and any implementation of this spec is a Perl 6. This is a distinction that a lot of projects make, but is a lot fuzzier, because they don't have specs. Consider Ruby: yes, JRuby is also a Ruby, but since there's no language spec, people still assume MRI when you say "Ruby". Perl people don't want you to assume Rakudo when discussing the language itself. This is why there's no minor version of "Perl 6". Language specifications change a lot less frequently than compilers. - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? Like most projects, as long as performance is Good Enough, it's good to get people start using it, and then work on performance after. Especially for a language where performance isn't a main goal, like Perl. As long as you haven't painted yourself into a corner with language decisions, performance improvement is refinement work. - Is there a need for a new Perl? What is it good for? I don't know if there's a _need_, but Perl 6 sure improves on a ton of things about Perl 5. It's the stuff that makes Perl Perl, but turned up to 22, not just 11. The last two are questions I can't really answer.

johnhayward 11y ago
> This is first, a reflection of the playfulness of Perl, and second, a statement about language design. The first release, an alpha, was 6.a. The second, a beta, was 6.b. The third, the actual 'final' release, was 6....c? Since it was being released on Christmas, and 'c' fits, it was decided that releases of Perl 6 would be named after holidays, and they went back and found them for A and B too. This sounds absolutely retarded. Back when Perl 5 this kind of hacker clown routine was popular, but now I think most people prefer a bit more simplicity and clarity.

edem 11y ago

For those who did not read the article: these questions are from the article itself! These aren't my questions.

hahainternet 11y ago
My apologies. I read it as sarcastically requestioning them.
- edem 11y ago
  No I was just genuinely curious since I have never used Perl 6 and I wanted to know whether it is worth it to give it a try.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    It's absolutely worth a try. Please see the fact that there are examples on this very page which are very succinct but hard to do in other languages.