19 ms·

Wow, Perl 6 [video]

• dhon_ 11y ago
  For anyone else that's confused - the linked page above is the presentation, but you need to use space or arrow keys to navigate. Also, the URL at the bottom is broken (says TPM2016.zoffix.com but links to http://zoffix.com/TMP2016 http://zoffix.com/TMP2016)
  • coldtea 11y ago
    I was 100% sure there would be a comment such as this. How are HNers still confused? The same exact instructions have been given time and again, for almost each and every presentation posted on HN -- and there are always 1-2 comments asking about them for any new presentation posted. New users? Not technical enough to try the keyboard arrows and/or space?
    • dugword 11y ago
      The experience is less than obvious when browsing from a phone. Swiping left is not my default when visiting a website.
    • stevep98 11y ago
      I clicked on "This presentation is available at..." and got a 404. So, yes, I was confused.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • unexistance 11y ago
      bad UX? anyway, need to enable JS by default AND yes, pressing arrow-keys on a webpage is definitely not (yet?) intuitive Space-bar makes sense tho, as it should have scroll down by default
      • coldtea 11y ago
        >bad UX? anyway, need to enable JS by default It's not a website. It's a PRESENTATION (given with a projector et al) made available online. JS on by default, is the default for the modern web in any case.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • mwfunk 11y ago
      There's nothing on the page to indicate that it responds to hotkeys, and there's a big (dead) link front and center that's labelled as leading to the presentation.
      • wernercd 11y ago
        This. If I was to randomly stumble across this, without having had someone say "use arrow keys"... there is NOTHING on the page to indicate what to do. I'm sitting at my desk... one hand holding a soda, one hand on mouse... and... nothing. What would I do normally? Mouse 3 (back page) and never return. Why? As far as it looks like, it's just a simple page with an "presentation coming (soon)" front page. Horrible UX.
        • Elrac 11y ago
          Fair enough! But I for one managed to guess from context (a solitary cover page just wouldn't make much sense) that I was looking at one of them there fancy "presentation HTMLs" and then I just had to guess how to work it. I tried the scroll wheel first (a reasonable expectation), then up-down keys (as many people would), and finally left-right turned out to do the trick. Some species of HTML presentation-creating software have the good sense and courtesy to put a navigation hint on the cover page. I think it would be a good thing for that to happen more universally.
          • wernercd 11y ago
            Navigational hints would be one step ("Use arrow keys to navigate" would be soooooo simply to add). Alternative methods would be another (floating/transparent arrows on the sides... prev/next page area's to click... sliding bar on the bottom to indicate something that can be moved) My two main gripes are lack of indicators/training... and forced use of keyboard. This is the web. Smart phones, tablets, mice, etc... But... that's just my not-so-humble non-ux-guy opinion :)
    • NDizzle 11y ago
      Sites like this would make sense to me if I downloaded them as .ppt files. I don't understand the need to 1) be so clever and 2) get mad when people call you for being annoyingly clever. I mean, first you take away the scroll bar, because it's ugly. Fine. Whatever. Next, you expect me cause the page to transition by moving RIGHT and LEFT. Not UP and DOWN, you know, like web pages have always worked. Finally, you don't bother to mention this fact anywhere on the website?!
      • coldtea 11y ago
        >I don't understand the need to 1) be so clever and 2) get mad when people call you for being annoyingly clever. What's clever? It's just a link to an online presentation. They don't use links etc because it's not a web page, just a html document -- it's primary use is for seeing it as slides through a projector. This fact is evident both from the text and from the site's looks, and from that everything else follows (how you navigate, etc). But confusion would still be OK, if we haven't had the exact same discussion 100s of times before on HN -- and if we weren't 99% devs, supposed to be able to solve much worse "mysteries" on our own...
        • reitanqild 11y ago
          > But confusion would still be OK, if we haven't had the exact same discussion 100s of times before on HN Hyperbole much? Or am I getting forgetful? > and if we weren't 99% devs, supposed to be able to solve much worse "mysteries" on our own... Ok, you get points for this.
    • reitanqild 11y ago
      Cannot remember having seen it. Tip: on my mobile at least, swiping works. (Protip to googlers around here: no, stop doing this on default blogger theme)
    • chris_wot 11y ago
      I read on an iPad.
• jgalt212 11y ago
  unicode sigils? yikes!
  • schoen 11y ago
    That reminds me of APL! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29... One of the examples there uses the ⍨ character!
  • autarch 11y ago
    As the second slide pointed out, you can use ASCII variants for everything. That said, I've found the Unicode operators nice to use in some cases, and I've been working on learning more about my compose key combinations.
  • SwellJoe 11y ago
    It sure makes for pretty code. And, it's gotten easy to use Unicode under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X over the past few years. I posted an example of hyper operators a little while back, and used the Texas variants because I thought it might be intimidating to show them with Unicode...and, they were just so darned clunky looking, I had to change them back, and included a little note that there was a non-Unicode way to use the feature, as well
    • eximius 11y ago
      It is pretty, though some of the sigils still look... strange - at least if you expect them to look like they might in LaTeX or something. Still, I can't imagine having to type those regularly. I don't count keystrokes or anything, but that just seems harsh.
      • SwellJoe 11y ago
        The typing isn't the bad part...you're going to spend more time reading the code than writing it, and it definitely helps readability. But, I do find I have a hard time keeping enough of Perl 6 in my head to make sense of what I'm reading. I believe this is because it's so new to me, even though I've written and read Perl 5 or many years. But, it also seems intimidatingly large as languages go. Anyway, I think I'm sympathetic to where you're coming from; Perl 6 is challenging looking. We may disagree about why. But, I think I like the Unicode enough to consider it a net positive for readability, even though I also think it makes for a very broad and deep language that will need ages to properly wrap ones head around. But, then again, if a language isn't big and broad, a big and broad ecosystem develops anyway (see JavaScript and so-called "JavaScript fatigue" for a prime example of that), so there's still a tremendous amount to grok before being really productive and literate in the language.
• CuriouslyC 11y ago
  I am trying really hard to approach Perl 6 with an open mind, but my gut reaction to most of the code I see is negative. It seems like the guiding principle was to create a language that gives you incredible freedom in terms of how you do things. While that is great in theory, in practice mentally modelling that expressiveness reduces the amount of attention I can devote to the specific problems being addressed by the code. Maybe if I put a lot of time in that would change; I don't see a big potential payout though, so I'm not going to bother. With that being said, grammars look well designed. If all I was doing was parsing/transforming text, I would definitely consider using Perl 6.
  • bane 11y ago
    It turns out lots of things make sense to parse using grammar like constructs: various binary formats, JSON, CSV, etc. I have a feeling that community writing decent parsers for once will make perl's parsing ability across the board pretty amazing and less fussy than just about anywhere else.
    • ktRolster 11y ago
      Perl has always been really good at parsing, it's one if its strengths. In fact, you can usually distinguish people who like perl from those who don't based on whether they understand regular expressions or not. Another thing I like about perl is a lot of the standard library functions take an array of inputs, or a single value; and return an array or a single value.
      • carlivar 11y ago
        Not sure about that, Ruby took the good parts of Perl regex parsing, such as the conditional format: var =~ /regex(match)/ With $1 and so on for each match.
        • adrusi 11y ago
          Regular expressions are improved in perl 6, using a syntax that allows better readability through whitespace and comments (previously the x modifier) and new features that make the regular expressions more like PEG grammars.
• foota 11y ago
  I remember thinking the advanced pattern matching was nothing short of amazing when I read about it a while ago.
  • pmarreck 11y ago
    it was amazing in Erlang years ago, where it was probably borrowed from, as well as Elixir today lol http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html
    • foota 11y ago
      Sorry, not what I meant. I was referring to the rules.
• Estragon 11y ago
  say "Code took {now - INIT now} seconds to run"; # Code took 0.01111143 seconds to run Implicit string interpolation??? What if I just want to print out the string "now"?
  • oleganza 11y ago
    Why implicit? There are braces around `now - INIT now`. In Ruby it'd be "Code took #{Time.now - start_time} seconds to run".
    • Estragon 11y ago
      Ah, right. Thanks.
  • Scarblac 11y ago
    If you want a real reason to be astonished, the bit with "INIT now" is run at a completely different time than the rest of the interpolation, apparently.
• rdtsc 11y ago
  > sub prefix:<∑> (*@els) { @els.sum } It is not exactly selling it ;-)
  • kbenson 11y ago
    That depends on your audience. There's a far more people that know mathematical summation than know how to program. Allowing a language to easily make good use of preexisting knowledge seems like a good selling point to me. Making it optional, as in provided through a module seems a sane way to gate it as well.
    • agumonkey 11y ago
      It would be funny it Perl6 manages to deliver what Fortress couldn't really (mathematical notation).
    • rdtsc 11y ago
      I was just implying that Perl was jokingly called a "write once" language. It certiainly was for me. Remember starting a bionformatics project with it, and after a few months, I could not read my own code. This just reminded me of that.
      • kbenson 11y ago
        There are definitely those times when that happens, but I find it's mostly when the code has grown without a plan, and that it's mostly a problem for every language. That said, Perl (5 or 6) can easily get you in trouble if you aren't disciplined and decide to take your one liner and make a program out of it without taking a bit of time to convert it into a more readable form. I'm still undecided on whether Perl 6 takes the TIMTOWTDI motto too far. There seem to be multiple purely cosmetic ways to do something (sigil-less variables), and that's less of a "more tha none way to do it" thing and more of a "more than one way to make it look" thing (colon method call syntax), and I'm not sure how that will work in practice. Then again, there are lots of things that I think are unequivocally much better, such as method signatures (which you can approximate in Perl 5 with Kavorka[1]) and OOP (which Moops[2] in Perl 5 seems to do a good job of bundling the various Moose family modules together for, with Kavorka). 1: https://metacpan.org/pod/Kavorka https://metacpan.org/pod/Kavorka 2: https://metacpan.org/pod/Moops https://metacpan.org/pod/Moops
• eximius 11y ago
  Hm. What is the origin of 'Texas symbols'? A reference to being old-fashioned or something? It's amusing, though I'm not sure it's the clearest euphemism
  • dugword 11y ago
    Everything is bigger in Texas... Texas symbols are two or more ascii characters that replace a single Unicode symbol.
    • eximius 11y ago
      Herm. That does seem simpler. I should have thought of that. Still, weird name.
      • peteretep 11y ago
        That is the most Perl name (and explanation) I can imagine. For some of us, that's the charm!
    • colomon 11y ago
      I've always thought there's also a tongue-in-cheek "Real Americans only use ASCII!!" connotation lurking in there as well.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• rjeli 11y ago
  say "Code took {now - INIT now} seconds to run"; # Code took 0.01111143 seconds to run `INIT now` ... aka COMEFROM.
  • rcthompson 11y ago
    INIT isn't new in Perl 6, although I believe applying it to expressions within a line of code rather than to blocks is.
  • Woodi 11y ago
    I don't thing so. It's not about "where" but about "time": 'now' is saved to ~value end used later
  • labster 11y ago
    Perl 6 does offer COMEFROM, they're just called CATCH blocks.
  • tyingq 11y ago
    It's more like a label for code to run at start. Also shows the Perl 6 way to interpolate code within a string literal. Compare to the rough Perl 5 equiv, for versions of Perl 5 before say existed: sleep 2; print "Code took @{[time() - $then]} seconds to run\n"; INIT{$then=time();}
  • zeveb 11y ago
    Sounds more like an equivalent of Lisp's LOAD-TIME-VALUE [1]. [1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/s_ld_tim.htm#load-time-value http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/s_ld_t...
• smitherfield 11y ago
  I'm reminded of the infamous quote from Star Wars prequel producer Rick McCallum: "It's so dense; every single image has so much going on."
• latenightcoding 11y ago
  Confusing UI! Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw I was planning to assist but had something else to do.
  • omaranto 11y ago
    Confusing UI? It's text separated into a sequence of pages: you read a page and when you're done you advance to the next one and so on. I like that sort of UI, books use it too.
• mbrock 11y ago
  Perl 6 fills me with a sense of childlike wonder and hope for the future and excitement about the world. Hacker News takes that excitement and beats it into a nasty pulp on the floor. Perl was my first language after QBASIC and a failed attempt at C. I thought it was super cool. I love how it's optimized for being awesome instead of pandering to dumbass lazy coworkers who won't RTFM.
  • dang 11y ago
    > Hacker News takes that excitement and beats it into a nasty pulp on the floor. You're as much a part of HN as anyone else is, and tons of people here like Perl 6. That's presumably why stories about it such as this one get upvoted so highly. Instead of dissing the community and adding to the negativity, it would be better to ignore it (which is hard, I know) and share some things about what you like so much.
    • mbrock 11y ago
      Thanks for your moderation! I'll just add that I generally love Hacker News, and I wish I knew a more constructive way to express my feeling here. (By the way, I think it's an interesting approach of MetaFilter to have a "meta" forum for meta-discussions like this one...) Larry Wall gave a state of the onion speech about Perl as a "postmodern" language... which means something like, its guiding principles aren't only classical or modernist... it doesn't just aim for simplicity, purity, elegance, unity, etc... instead, it includes some very different values, like plurality, camp, fun, "just weird enough"-ness, "ha ha only serious"... some quotes: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html > I combined these cool features [from all kinds of other languages] in a way that makes sense to me as a postmodern linguist, not in a way that makes sense to the typical Modernistic computer scientist. Recall that the essence of Modernism is to take one cool idea and drive it into the ground. > Well...Perl does one thing, and does it well. What it does well is to integrate all its features into one language. More importantly, it does this without making them all look like each other. Ducts shouldn't look like girders, and girders shouldn't look like ducts. Neither of those should look like water pipes, and it's really important that water pipes not look like sewer pipes. Or smell like sewer pipes. Modernism says that we should make all these things look the same (and preferably invisible). Postmodernism says it's okay for them to stick out, and to look different, because a duct ought to look like a duct, and a sewer pipe ought to look like a sewer pipe, and hammer ought to look like a hammer, and a telephone ought to look like either a telephone, or a Star Trek communicator. > How does Perl put the focus onto the creativity of the programmer? Very simple. Perl is humble. It doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program. It lets the programmer decide what rules today, and what sucks. It doesn't have any theoretical axes to grind. And where it has theoretical axes, it doesn't grind them. Perl doesn't have any agenda at all, other than to be maximally useful to the maximal number of people. To be the duct tape of the Internet, and of everything else. You've heard the joke, I'm sure. How is duct tape like the Force? It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together. > Let me state my beliefs about this in the strongest possible way. The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil. I love this attitude, and I think it's very hackeresque, so yeah, it's nice to see it upvoted and discussed on Hacker News.
• reitanqild 11y ago
  Favourite so far, the "whatever" operator :-)
  • draegtun 11y ago
    It's available for Perl5 too - https://metacpan.org/pod/Whatever https://metacpan.org/pod/Whatever
• giancarlostoro 11y ago
  So just curious can anyone share their uses of Perl 6 and if they have anything going on in production? I already know that CraigsList at one point (if not still) is powered by Perl, but I'm not sure which Perl that is really. On another note: I find it quite fascinating that Perl 6 is implemented in Perl 6, that would in theory allow you to implement Perl for .NET or the JVM and retain plenty of Perl as a result if I'm not mistaken. Edit: fixed up my post
  • perlgeek 11y ago
    > On another note: I find it quite fascinating that Perl 6 is implemented in Perl 6, that would in theory allow you to implement Perl for .NET or the JVM Rakudo already has a JVM backend! It's not used as much as the MoarVM backend, mostly because the startup time of the JVM is horrible, but it's there. A Javascript backend is being worked on.
    • Montezuma123 11y ago
      Yea I think the JVM backend was broken recently by a patch (if I remember correctly), but should be fixed soon if not already. I'm surprised it actually works so well when MoarVM isn't 100% done. I assume the JVM would allow you to use Java libraries as well?
      • collyw 11y ago
        That sort of thing doesn't sound encouraging to someone who is keen to try Perl 6 with the intention of using it for real world projects.
        • Ultimatt 11y ago
          Just use a Rakudo Star release on MoarVM and it will be stable. Since Christmas it will be stable and conform to the official 'Perl 6.C' language specification. A lot of people in Perl6 land keep up with HEAD development building the Rakudo compiler from source daily/weekly with a tool called rakudobrew. HEAD by definition can sometimes be funky, a lot of the reports floating around are use cases against development builds and not official releases. Rakudo improves daily the development is that rapid. With the spec frozen the improvements are mostly performance, relatively obscure bugs and nice things like a better REPL.
• mrkgnao 11y ago
  I see a lot of Haskell-ish things there.
  • Montezuma123 11y ago
    Haskell had a big influence on Perl6. Lazy evaluation is built in to the language just like Haskell. If you look at the bottom of the Perl6 website you'll see the Fibonacci sequence using a lazy infinite list. Fun fact, one of the original Perl6 implementations was done in Haskell (the parrot VM I think).
    • ab5tract 11y ago
      Parrot VM is a separate project from Perl 6. It originally started as a VM that could handle Perl 6, but then decided it wanted to focus on being a general VM for dynamic languages. This led to a rift between the two communities. Before all that happened, though, there was Pugs, which is the Perl-6-on-Haskell thingy that you are thinking of. A fair portion of the current Perl 6 test suite comes from the Pugs project, at least originally. And, IIUC, it was the success of Pugs that revived the Perl 6 efforts and led to the Rakudo project (Perl 6 implemented in Perl 6) which is what we still use today. So yeah, it is definitely the case that Haskell had a big influence on Perl 6 both from a language design and a more raw "inspiration" in the sense that it literally might not have happened without it -- the original wave of Perl 6 development had largely failed and there was some serious burnout happening. Pugs, Haskell, and Audrey Tang managed to put the ship back on course. A lot of history happens in 16 years, and I make no claim to know the truth of any of it. There are more than a few rants floating around out there that will give you a picture of what happened when, albeit from a ranty perspective. Hopefully one day it will all be collected in a more comprehensive historical document.
      • Montezuma123 11y ago
        Ah, yes you are correct. Thanks for pointing out some of the finer historical notes! I bet there are plenty of people here that would be impressed to know how much P6 has to do with Haskell. I think the general impression isn't one of lots of advanced ideas but Hey Perl finally got a decent object system which is kinda sad lol.
• Montezuma123 11y ago
  I for one am extremely excited for Perl6's ecosystem to grow, documentation to increase, and for the performance optimizations to reach maturity. Perl5 has raw text processing power, but Perl6 kicks that into overdrive with a much cleaner language (clean and powerful OO with a MOP), with cool goodies from a dozen other languages. I think this may be the first decent contender for the 100 year language if it becomes production worthy.
  • collyw 11y ago
    Perl gets proper OOP, as now that OOP seems to be out of fashion! (I wish the fashion part of our industry would disappear and people would use the correct tools appropriately. OOP still has plenty of valid cases in my opinion).
    • zaphar 11y ago
      OOP isn't out of fashion, per se, I don't think. Inheritance is what really went out of fashion. Part of the problem, I think, is that people use OOP and Inheritance interchangeably too much. objects are just syntax sugar for a closure or a set of curried functions. As such they are useful. It's inheritance that gave OOP a bad name.
      • raiph 11y ago
        I still recall reading ECOOP papers in the 80s that made it very clear that composition is a much better approach for most things than inheritance (and that a single inheritance mechanism is generally much simpler than a multiple inheritance one). But, while Larry Wall agreed in the sense he put emphasis on features such as roles (cf Haskell type classes) he has also said that there are some important scenarios in which inheritance (and very occasionally multiple inheritance) make coding a solution to a problem more straightforward where use of composition makes it less so, so standard Perl 6 supports both composition (eg roles) and (multiple) inheritance and the compiler (which is written in Perl 6) uses one or the other based on whichever is deemed to work best.
    • tyingq 11y ago
• galistoca 11y ago
  http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/13 http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/13 ==> Is this a feature that Perl authors are promoting about the language? If so, I can understand why it's not gaining traction. Coding like this benefits absolutely NO ONE--including the one who wrote the code. The hipster coder who's just excited to learn perl for the first time may try it out, just to come back the next day and wonder "what the hell did I write"
  • dang 11y ago
    This kind of response is as reflexive as it is common; every innovation in programming language notation meets with it immediately. I think it has to be regarded as a middlebrow dismissal, indeed the middlebrow dismissal in its class. It's Tall Poppy Syndrome applied to programming languages: no unfamiliar expressions allowed. No language makes sense before you learn it. Therefore unfamiliarity should cause us to suspend judgment, not rush to it. Otherwise we end up with what Alan Kay calls pop culture programming, which tragically junks things like the breathtakingly beautiful and powerful APL, and limits us to surface tweaks around the edges.
    • galistoca 11y ago
      I studied natural language processing so have used perl a lot in the past. I kind of drifted away since then, but remember that it made me feel cool when I was writing a perl code, but made me feel stupid when reading one--even the ones I wrote--kind of like how regular expression is easy to write but hard to interpret. I think a language needs to be both easy to express and easy to comprehend in order to gain adoption and that's what I was trying to say.
      • Mithaldu 11y ago
        If reading regexes you wrote is a pain point for you, then you're not making as much use of the readability tools Perl provides as you could, i.e. the /x modifier to make unescaped whitespace insignificant, and in-regex comments. ( http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html ) And well, honestly, more often than not i found that "hard to read" perl code would be just as hard to read if it was written in lisp, python, c, or any other language you care to name; since more often than not that code is hard to read due to variables and functions having names that don't help the reader understand what they're holding or doing, and long blocks of code not having been encapsulated into functions well enough. And lastly, to tie in to dang's point: Having "used Perl a lot" does not mean much if you have not also "learned Perl a lot". I've known, in the extreme, a Perl dev of 10 years experience, who had started out as a C dev, and yet did not use or trust Perl hashes, instead opting to write his own data structure encoding format. Have you ever read chromatic's Modern Perl?
• scrame 11y ago
  Some of this looks great. I'm suffering through making some internal tools an old version of php after deprecating some older perl 5 cgi scripts on an even older CentOS box, and reaaally not enjoying it. I understand the value of coding in other texts, but I still get a little squicked out seeing the characters for pi, and union, etc in code. I know they have ascii equivalents, but its not saving a keystroke, exactly. Though, it does remind me of some joker Swift posts where the identifiers were all emoji's. I'd keep interns away from it for now. The built-in grammar parser looks great! C-lib integration looks promising. Multi-methods look nice. Operator overloads look ... safe-ish-er than C++. Simpler profiling. Perl5 module + other language in-lining looks great and terrible. "Whatever" wildcards don't quite seem like full pattern-matching, but better than $_ or endless shift loops. Overall, seems pretty good! If I can just drop it in for my "perl -lne 'm|($regex)|g&&print$1'" command-line use I might swap it out sooner than later.
  • zoffix222 11y ago
    You read a piece of code many more times than you write it, so even if an extra keystroke is needed to make the code more readable, it's worth it, IMO. But, I find it very easy to type all that fancy stuff with XCompose sequences. My keyboard also has a bunch of media keys I never use, so it's probably possible to map those into the unicode ops.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• betimsl 11y ago
  So much of the syntactic sugar that you'll almost always will forget to use.
  • white-flame 11y ago
    That's what I like about Lisp's s-expressions: Every operator is syntactically equivalent, so there tend not to be as many "forgotten tricks". You just write the code that does the thing.
• andrepd 11y ago
  For a while there I was confused on whether this was an April fools prank or not. Which certainly does justice to Perl.
  • S4M 11y ago
    I thought it was strange to be able to use greek characters and the like in the code, and then I arrived at the slide about Custom Terms and Operators[0] and... now I think it's an April fool. [0] http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/12 http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/12
    • sp332 11y ago
      That's not a joke at all, you really can define those as custom operators if you want to.
    • dfan 11y ago
      Julia lets you use Unicode in your code as well, and it's great. I use Julia for math a lot and it's really nice to go straight from your equations to code with variables named α and ϵ instead of alpha and epsilon. The vim and emacs modes also make it make it easy to enter characters like this. http://iaindunning.com/blog/julia-unicode.html http://iaindunning.com/blog/julia-unicode.html (note: 2 years old)
    • zoffix222 11y ago
      If you watch the actual presentation, that slide was there to make people chuckle. It worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw
    • coldtea 11y ago
      >I thought it was strange to be able to use greek characters and the like in the code We have been doing that for AGES. Not just in languages like APL, but even in Javascript, Go and tons more... https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names
      • 11y ago
• muraiki 11y ago
  My boss came up with a good analogy to describe why some people like Perl and why some don't. There are some people who appreciate games that are very abstract and with simple rules from which complex behavior emerges, such as a game like Go. These people tend to be drawn towards programming languages that are built out of small pieces with a consistent philosophy from the ground up, such as lisp or Haskell. There are others who enjoy games with complex rulesets and lots of detail. These people probably like Perl with all its nooks and crannies. Perl code has many things to discover, and the way you assemble larger things relies on unique features of these smaller things. While in the end both approaches have you building a larger thing out of smaller things, the former approach is more likely to be built out of all of the same small thing, while the latter is more likely to be built out of a bunch of different small things. I think that's why some people can find Perl code to be "dense" and others find it "expressive". I think Perl 6 was built with a much more consistent philosophy behind it than Perl 5, so this analogy breaks down a bit. But the user experience, the "Perlishness" of it, still remains. To the extent that people pick sides in language wars, I hope this analogy can help people appreciate the other side.
  • baldfat 11y ago
    I started with Perl in the 1990s and well it was the only game in town for the things I needed to get done. Now as a semi-professional programmer (Temporary work and side jobs at work) I have learned to love Racket (Lisp Family), awk/sed and R. Since I only do this less then full time my brain can't hold everything in it for Perl or similar languages. I can sit down with a Lisp and just work it out with the parts I know and have to look up things far less.
    • chucky_z 11y ago
      Interesting you mention awk. Do you use that professionally? For string manipulation I use almost exclusively pipe output to bash then format/grok with awk/sed, and wish that more (any?) languages implemented them fully!
      • baldfat 11y ago
• Gratsby 11y ago
  I'm still upset with the perl6 devs for sending me down the Haskell rathole so many years ago, but perl brought a lot of pretty great things forward and it was by far the best text parsing language for entirely too long. I like what I'm seeing today and I'm willing to give it another shot. I am a bit concerned about whether perl is going to be able to gain momentum again. It won't take too long before people start checking it out and there are some good real-world use case benchmarks.
• mostafah 11y ago
  Does anybody know if there is any plan for updating the Camel Book for Perl 6?
• zoffix222 11y ago
  Author here. Never would've thought my slides I used for a presentation to 20-something people would make it to front page of HN... You can watch the actual presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paa3niF72Nw I also wrote down the answers for questions that came up during the presentation here: http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/03/wow-perl-6-talk-slides-recording-and-answers-to-questions.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/03/wow-perl-6-t... (I now updated to include these in the slides too) And to respond to some commenters, yes, some features (like the shrug operator) were presented in a humorous fashion. No one's advocating you actually make your code look like an orgy of emoticons. I didn't use PPT for the slides, because I like the freedom of needing only a browser to display the slides. They weren't really meant for public consumption, thus the UI is not entirely obvious. I'm unsure why the person who posted this on HN posted only the slides and not the recording or the blog post. But I have no control over that. And if anyone has any more questions, you can join us on IRC at irc://irc.freenode.net/#perl6 Cheers.
  • ohitsdom 11y ago
    > I didn't use PPT for the slides, because I like the freedom of needing only a browser to display the slides. What did you use to make the presentation? Custom HTML/JS?
    • zoffix222 11y ago
      No, I just took it from another presenter and changed the content of the slides. I believe it's actually a themeable slideshow thingie someone else developed.
      • nickodell 11y ago
        Got a git url?
        • zoffix222 11y ago
          Only to my slides: https://github.com/zoffixznet/TPM-2016 https://github.com/zoffixznet/TPM-2016
• Tepix 11y ago
  There's a new Perl 6 book being written as we speak. I have high hopes that it can follow the excellent example of the Camel book. If it does, it can be the starting shot that Perl 6 perhaps still needs.
  • sb057 11y ago
    Mind sharing the name of that upcoming book?
    • Montezuma123 11y ago
      Learning Perl6. It will be the continuation of Learning Perl, but for Perl6 instead of Perl5 I think. My bet is they'll (last edition had 3 authors)continue to publish both as both languages will survive for a long time until Perl6 wins out. There's also the possibility Perl6 just never really takes off, but I hope not. Brian D. Foy has a WordPress site up for it. There is a perl6 intro website as well that is awesome.
      • justinator 11y ago
        If you are taking preorders, you've got mine!
• ableal 11y ago
  I took a couple of minutes to chase the butterfly ... It's featured here: https://perl6.org/ https://perl6.org/ "Hi, my name is Camelia. I'm the spokesbug for Perl 6, [...]" (image: https://perl6.org/camelia-logo.png https://perl6.org/camelia-logo.png) and the link in the image leads to the 2009 rationale by Larry Wall: http://github.com/perl6/mu/raw/master/misc/camelia.txt http://github.com/perl6/mu/raw/master/misc/camelia.txt Also, some people were not amused: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1149576 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1149576
  • effie 11y ago
    > Also, some people were not amused: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1149576 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1149576 Eek. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
• throw7 11y ago
  Is this is a joke or does perl 6 actually use that hyper arrows thing? Reminds me of an old language that used math symbols and had a custom keyboard with those keys on it.
  • tadzik_ 11y ago
    It's no joke. You're free to use the asciified versions of those though, like << instead of the proper «. It's really not that much work to put them in your keyboard layout though, and I found myself using them a lot more often than when writing Perl 6 :)
  • JadeNB 11y ago
    > Reminds me of an old language that used math symbols and had a custom keyboard with those keys on it. In case you're interested, that was the inventively named "A Programming Language", APL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) ).
• awwaiid 11y ago
  In a few weeks we are having the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop (in Baltimore on April 16) where there are a few talks on Perl 6. Join us! http://dcbpw.org/ http://dcbpw.org/
• Ultimatt 11y ago
  If anyone's interested in following Perl 6 news the subreddit usually gets most updates: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl6 https://www.reddit.com/r/perl6
• garfieldnate 11y ago
  The title sums it up. Good ol' Perl text processing, plus awesome new list processing (will be useful for n-grams, etc.). My favorite is slide #85, though. Communication with other processes in Perl 5 is always a huge pain, and I can never get it to not hang; you have to unbuffer STDOUT via $|++, then you have to read from STDIN and maybe STDERR to keep it from blocking. The Java solution is similarly painful, requiring spinning up threads for reading each stream (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14165517/processbuilder-forwarding-stdout-and-stderr-of-started-processes-without-blocki http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14165517/processbuilder-f...).