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Even though this could more properly be called, "Why having language support for M:N thread multiplexing is important", I thought it was a refreshing article on
by 16bytes 9y ago
Even though this could more properly be called, "Why having language support for M:N thread multiplexing is important", I thought it was a refreshing article on why I might actually use a bit of perl6.
Last year I attended a conference and saw Larry Wall speak. It was an overview of Perl 6 and I was completely underwhelmed. Larry spent about half the time talking about unicode support. It wasn't a boring talk, but I never felt a moment when I said, "Awesome! This is a pain point in some other languages and I would pick up perl6 if this ever happened again."
I don't want to write perl6 completely off, but I have found that perl6 advocates have not done a great job on why you would actually want to use it. It's hard to justify learning "different" syntax just because someone says, "hey, it's fun!".
- jxramos 9y agoI had saw an old coworker at a Python meetup group session the other week and I started to remember he and others had to support all these Perl scripts. Since leaving that place and seeing so much of Python everywhere I thought the other day where Perl wound up in the mix of things several years later. Seems like the community kept going.
- raiph 9y agoExtending Evan's analogy, perhaps trying to explain the joke ruins the joke?
- cutler 9y agoBetter math is one good reason. Grammars are also a great feature of Perl 6.
- 16bytes 9y agoI've never faced a problem in another modern language where math became a big problem. Even using something like numpy made never made me frustrated with, say, python's numerical types. From what I've seen perl6 makes some operations more convenient. Cool, I guess, but not a great reason to reach for perl6. Grammars are really cool, and one reason I might reach for perl6, but you also have really great special-purpose tools like Antlr. I suppose I don't feel the need grammars that often to need them reified in my language of choice, but next time I need to do some parsing, however, I will probably play around with perl6.
- cutler 9y agoI should have been more specific. Try this in Ruby, Python, PHP or Javascript: 0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3 . You'll get an approximation in most languages but only Perl 6 returns 0.
- 16bytes 9y agoYes, I understand the example. It's a classic floating point numbers demonstration. What I am saying is that I have not encountered a real-life case where this would have made my life easier. Again, it's neat, but not a real reason to move to a new language.
- petre 9y agoBanking/accounting software? Generating reports that are expected to return correct data w/o cumulative errors from flating point arithmetic? After all, Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language.
- 16bytes 9y agoI'm not saying there aren't applications where it is useful. If you can't tolerate errors, then you typically don't use floats in the first place. We've been running banking/accounting software for a long time without Perl 6. What I am saying is that this isn't a killer feature. It makes me go, "Oh, neat", and not, "Wow, this will make my life so much easier".
- cutler 9y agoThen I have to assume you're not working in any kind of commercial or financial sector where approximations are not acceptable. Perl 6 and Go should be lauded for solving this problem.
- 16bytes 9y agoActually, I work in analytics well inside the commercial sector. 10 digits of accuracy works most of the time, and when it doesn't there are other alternatives. As with anything there are trade-offs. I wish more languages would do this and I happily applaud Perl 6 and go for allowing sane operations in the real space without needing separate packages. But there are high quality packages for all modern languages that allow you to get precision if you need it. I'm not debating the utility of this feature, but I am saying it's not--by itself--going to make me want to pick up Perl 6 for my next project.