19 ms·

Perl 6 Optimism

157 points by vgy7ujm 9y ago

joosters 9y ago
I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using python 2.x. In short, there’s no sensible upgrade path, Perl 5 & 6 are very much their own language. If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago. Trying to hack in some Perl 5 style functions into it now seems futile...
- ionforce 9y ago
  Should have chosen a different name for the language.
  - yesbut 9y ago
    I feel that there should probably be a name change, but ultimately I don't really care. I am enjoying the language and they can call it whatever they want. If and when they change the name I will just refer to it as the new name.
  - petre 9y ago
    There were numerous discussions about this and it was decided against it. Eventually one would use Perl 5 from inside Perl 6 with the "use v5" statement.
    - vgy7ujm 9y ago
      If this really had worked seamlessly it would be great. But that includes /usr/bin/perl working this way on every OS etc... with a clear&easy upgrade path for existing code.
      - petre 9y ago
        Well Perl 5 needs a spec in order to be supported inside Perl 5. Otherwise which version do you support? 5.6? 5.10.1? 5.16?
    - cthor 9y ago
      Clarification: Decided by the Perl 6 devs who want to keep the name and don't seem to care about the damage that decision does to Perl 5
      - petre 9y ago
        One of the discussion was on the Perl blogs[1]. Most of the devs there are Perl 5 devs and they also decided against the name change. Perl 6 is the next iteration of Perl that has been redesigned from the ground up. Why should it bare a different name? Yes, the redesign took more than a decade and it's incompatible with Perl 5, but so is Python 3.6 compared to 2.7, albeit to a lesser extent. Even Perl 5.26 has changed a lot since 5.6. In fact the least common denominator is 5.10.1. Using older versions is discouraged since they're largely unsupported by the majority of CPAN modules. 1. http://blogs.perl.org http://blogs.perl.org
        cthor 9y ago
        The most recent discussion I saw on this subject[1] makes it very clear that there isn't a consensus. If there is, it's in the "Perl 6 should rename" direction. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter_to_the_perl_community/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter...
        vorg 9y ago
        > Yes, the redesign took more than a decade Quite true! In fact, the redesign took more than a decade and a half (July 2000 to Dec 2015). A record worth breaking!
      - virtualsue 9y ago
        It was a decision made by Larry Wall alone.Since it’s his language, he’s allowed to do that.
  - corpMaverick 9y ago
    A new name would have kept momentum in Perl 5 and it would have made Perl 6 more sexy. It is sad, Perl is amazing, I still use it as my personal scripting language. Back in the day I wrote complete enterprise applications.
  - sampo 9y ago
    > Should have chosen a different name for the language. I wonder if Fortran 2008 wasn't called Fortran, could it be sold to computer science people as a "fast, type-checked matlab".
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    What ... like Ruby? :-) Perl6 has some compatibility -- at the wetware level. Which is not nothing.
- zura 9y ago
  You can actually use Perl 5 and even Python modules from Perl 6: https://github.com/niner https://github.com/niner
  - joosters 9y ago
    There are gotchas and unsupported functionality (e.g. 'since Perl 6 does not have the same concept of "context", Perl 5 methods are always called in list context.') which effectively mean that you've got no idea if library 'foo' will work or not without a thorough review of the code. At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon. There's still no sane upgrade path here.
    - lizmat 9y ago
      > At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon. The same could be said for XS. And I do think that all of Perl 5 is relying upon that. > There's still no sane upgrade path here. FWIW, my blog post https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to-the-perl-community/ https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to-the-perl-comm... touches on that subject.
      - jerf 9y ago
        XS is the "same" hack all the time, though. A Perl library that can only be called in list context in Perl 6 is a substantial change from Perl 5. I've seen much smaller changes trash code bases before. I've got real code that would be affected by that. (I also think the context idea was a misfire in Perl <6, but as long as it is there, I've sometimes written code that had to deal with it.) That said, why is it impossible to call a Perl 5 function in scalar context? Shouldn't the equivalent of Perl 5's "scalar" be fairly easy to implement? It may stink to have to manually use it, but it wouldn't be very often, and it's easy enough to use any of half-a-dozen Perl 6 features to minimize the syntactic hit.
        raiph 9y ago
        > why is it impossible to call a Perl 5 function in scalar context? Has Stefan (who wrote IP5) said or written that it's impossible? 18 months ago he wrote "So far I've found 3 different ways to implement scalar/list context for method/function calls".[1] He has left issue #31 open.[2] Where did you read that it's impossible? [1] https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-08-03#i_12961486 https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-08-03#i_12961486 [2] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/issues/31 https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/issues/31
- simias 9y ago
  Pretty much. I used to use Perl 5 a lot but I never considered using Perl 6 and eventually moved on from the Perl ecosystem altogether. The huge advantage of Perl ~10 years ago was the massive amount of CPAN packages but in the meantime python & friends mostly caught up in my experience. Meanwhile the shiny new revolutionary Perl 6 took forever to release and when it finally did nobody cared anymore. Quoting Wikipedia: >The design process for Perl 6 began in 2000. [...] on December 25, 2015, the first stable version of the specification was announced. I can respect taking the time to do things right but when your development history resembles that of Duke Nukem Forever something is off. That in my opinion hurt Perl more than anything else, even more so than the lack of compatibility between Perl 5 and Perl 6. If Perl 6 had released in early-to-mid 2000 I think there would've been enough interest out there to bridge the gap. It would've been messy but it could've worked. Instead Perl 5 felt a bit like a legacy language "while we wait for Perl 6 to be finished" and Perl 6 was nowhere to be found. And Perl went from the de-facto scripting language for un*x to people asking "Is Rakudo Perl 6 used in production?".
  - joosters 9y ago
    I agree, it definitely hurt mainline Perl development when Perl 6 was this promised great new thing. At least Perl 5 never got abandoned, and there is development and bugfixing still going on today. Perl 5 has a feeling of being 'complete' as a language. I guess this makes it unsexy and it'll never be the cutting edge where all the cool devs want to work, but it's rock solid stable and reliable. Now, if only Perl 5 could get a JIT compiler...
    - toyg 9y ago
      > I guess this makes it unsexy Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.
      - vgy7ujm 9y ago
        I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.
- jbucaran 9y ago
  Yeah, but I think it's because they have the same name, only the number on the right is different and people tend to assume that Perl 6 is the one after 5.
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  >I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. A lot of people seem to have forgotten, or maybe they weren't around for it, but when Larry anounced Perl 6 it wasn't for a totally different language. It was the next version of Perl. Just as Perl 5 was to Perl 4, and 4 was to 3 and so on. This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is something people started saying when it was clear that Perl 6 wasn't just around the corner.
  - dkarl 9y ago
    Almost. Perl 6 was always meant to be a step beyond Perl 5 rather than just an extension or evolution, but initially, Perl 5 was supposed to be a supported syntax. It would be one of many supported by the runtime, and the primary syntax people meant when they said "Perl 6" was going to be a clean break from the past — which excited many people such as myself who despised Perl 5 while envying its terseness — but the underlying engine was supposed to support Perl 5 with seamless interop from Perl 6. When they gave that up, they needed to work out a completely new plan for maintaining interest and driving adoption, but instead of reassessing they seem to have decided "who cares, it's gonna be so awesome that it won't matter." It might work, but I'm not holding my breath.
  - raiph 9y ago
    > when Larry anounced Perl 6 ... ... he very clearly emphasized that it was NOT just the next version of Perl, in contrast with his approach with earlier Perls. > This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is something people started saying when it was clear that Perl 6 wasn't just around the corner. I think it's just a chinese whispers effect. To folk who paid attention to what Larry said on day one, it was obvious that P5 and P6 were (are) not the same and are not totally different either and are related. Around a decade ago some folk began repeating the mantra that P5 and P6 were different languages in the same family. The hope was that this would help. But some folk don't like nuance so they arrived at clearly made up and extreme views like "completely different language ... no relation with 5".
- unixhero 9y ago
  It's the spiritual successor
- raiph 9y ago
  > Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language P5 and P6 have been explicitly different languages since day one[1]. As Larry Wall said, "We had to make almost everything [in Perl 5] ... backward compatible [with previous Perls] ... But now it’s the first chance to [break bug-for-bug syntactic and semantic compatibility] and ... I think we should [take the chance]." > There’s no compatibility between the two. None? With an appropriately compiled perl 5 binary installed one can install regular Perl 5 modules from CPAN and use them as if they were Perl 6 modules: use Some:Perl5::Module:from<Perl5> ; How is this not compatible? > You can’t write a library that works in both versions Even the large complex Perl 5 package Catalyst works in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 per the above. > so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful Per the above, the majority of CPAN just works 100% correctly out of the box. > If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago. P6ers thought about backward compatibility with Perl 5 from day one[1]. [1] https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/ https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/
- makecheck 9y ago
  Also, how would similar functions even be enough? The average Perl script I had was full of special operators, etc. (they all changed and are impossible to Google anyway). And code bases have more than enough churn without being fundamentally rewritten multiple times to do the same thing.
sunseb 9y ago
Is Perl 6 sill so damn slow?
- yesbut 9y ago
  Performance has improved a lot since the initial release: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/day-16-%F0%9F%8E%B6-deck-the-halls-with-perf-improvements-%F0%9F%8E%B6/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/day-16-%F0%9F%8...
  - fnord123 9y ago
    Performance improved a lot but it's still very bad. e.g. there is some csv-game[1] where there is perl6 code that used to take 16 minutes but now 'only' takes 5 minutes. perl5 completes the task in <3s. [1] https://bitbucket.org/ewanhiggs/csv-game/src/9604dc176b6303ef9fcee1d9fc46d40bc786a569/perl/?at=master https://bitbucket.org/ewanhiggs/csv-game/src/9604dc176b6303e...
    - lizmat 9y ago
      https://twitter.com/zoffix/status/955290358434451456 https://twitter.com/zoffix/status/955290358434451456
    - petre 9y ago
      Too bad there are is no P6 code on the benchmarks game[1]. Probably a good opportunity to learn P6. https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org
      - igouy 9y ago
        "If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements." https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex Like this guy does -- https://pybenchmarks.org/ https://pybenchmarks.org/
stesch 9y ago
I'm still wondering why they use non ASCII characters for operators.
- yesbut 9y ago
  Perl 6 has ASCII versions of every unicode operator: https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii
  - collyw 9y ago
    Is there a key for it on my keyboard though?
    - perlgeek 9y ago
      Hey, we have docs for that :-) https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode#Entering_Unicode_Codepoints_and_Codepoint_Sequences https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode#Entering_Unicode_Cod...
    - yesbut 9y ago
      yes, all of the ASCII characters are standard on most keyboards.
    - sedachv 9y ago
      Here is a nickel kid, get yourself a real text editor: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/International.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/In... Do you realize people that speak more than two languages already use multiple keyboard layouts all of the time?
- yorwba 9y ago
  Why not? It's a neat way of showing off fundamental Unicode support, and AFAIK there are ASCII equivalents for all of them, in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever.
  - 9y ago
baybal2 9y ago
I used perl when dinosaurs still roamed the land. Can somebody explain why it took so long for Perl 6? I read first p6/parrot vm textbook as a schoolboy more than a decade ago.
- c256 9y ago
  Honestly? Because Perl 5 was ‘good enough’ and widely installed, and then critical mass moved on to python and JavaScript (which both then developed their own version skew issues).
  - ivanhoe 9y ago
    you mean php? :)
- rurban 9y ago
  Because parrot development was mismanaged and ran into ground. Similar to perl5 management in the last 15 years.
  - vgy7ujm 9y ago
    Is there any hope of seeing your cperl efforts in mainstream perl? Would you be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back?
    - rurban 9y ago
      You have to ask them. They are the ones refusing any changes and cooperation, and are still actively destructive. In parrot the destructive people eventually burned out, and I could fix much stuff, but the big changes from around 2.7, the calling convention and the jit and runloop removal was eventually too much.
    - ribasushi 9y ago
      > be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back It is essentially impossible to do so, as the problems are systemic and run extraordinarily deep. Would you honestly consider any possibility of working on a "level" with people like this: https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2018/01/msg248689.html https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2018/01/m... So I can't fault rurban for walking away. The project still has merit. Its current leadership - none.
cousin_it 9y ago
Another year, another chance for all involved to learn the important rationality skill of recognizing sunk costs and opportunity costs, and give up when giving up is the best option. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/
- melling 9y ago
  Perl 6 was announced in the year 2000. 18 years is a long time. It should be a case study for software developers. I don’t know if they should give up. Haven’t looked at Perl 6 in about 5 years. The best thing the community could do would be to turn the language into the solution to a particular problem: Web development, machine learning, etc Sure, anyone could build everything from scratch, but that’s usually not a good idea.
  - rwmj 9y ago
    Why? Open source developers can work on whatever they want.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    I went to OScon in something like 2009 or 10 and someone working on the python interpreter they were gonna share with Perl got on stage and showed how the roadmap and their velocity wouldn’t have Perl 6 done until 2016. This kind of crazy has been identified in the ecosystem for a while.
- perlgeek 9y ago
  If Perl 6 were a centrally managed and funded effort to create a popular language, I would a agree that the one who funds it would look at adoption numbers and time spent, and declare it sunk cost, and try to achieve their objectives through other means. But everybody who's working on Perl 6 does it because they enjoy it, learn by doing it etc. Why should they declare it a failure? Usage numbers are slowly, slowly creeping up, and working with and on Perl 6 can be real fun. If I'd work on it regardless on how much of my previous time I invested in it, why should I even consider sunk costs?
bigbluedots 9y ago
Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  Perl 5? Off the top of my head: Deutsche Bank, Broadbean, Photobox, BBC, Booking.com, Net-A-Porter. I'm sure a more enthusiastic Perl user can provide a surfeit of examples.
  - vgy7ujm 9y ago
    DuckDuckGo, ZipRecruiter
    - dmux 9y ago
      Athenahealth
      - geoffc 9y ago
        OpenAir, Ambrahealth
  - theOnliest 9y ago
    All of FastMail is in Perl5 (minus the Cyrus parts, which are in C).
  - latenightcoding 9y ago
    NVIDIA, Shutterstock, Symantec, Amadeus IT Group, Bank of America
- ryanianian 9y ago
  A surprisingly huge amount of the Amazon.com codebase is Perl 5. The various back-ends are primarily in Java, but most front-end code is Perl/Mason.
  - 9y ago
crusso 9y ago
I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it. That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days? Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby a decade ago and saying, "Wow, programming just got fun again"? I'd love to see a Perl 6 breakthrough, but honestly it feels like those attempts to keep BeOS going... too little, too late. Its time has passed.
- vgy7ujm 9y ago
  Perl 5 is still as fun as ever. And newer things like Mojolicious keeps adding to the goodness.
  - petre 9y ago
    Yes, Perl 5 is still fun, but I really like the chaining and FP in Perl 6, much like autobox but native. And native sets, rational number math instead of floating point math, the ability to use huge numbers without BigNum and lots of other awesoneness.
- 0x445442 9y ago
  Actually, I've been looking at Perl 6 and I think it's quite amazing. It's really the only language outside those I get paid to work with that I've considered doing a deep dive on. I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story. For example can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars in Python, Ruby, Groovy etc? Also, https://modules.perl6.org/ https://modules.perl6.org/ seems to be growing.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    > I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story. I think far more likely is the people that have decided to dislike "Perl" are letting their prejudice leak. Perl 5 is one of those languages that is hides complexity, partially by accident. I'm sure a lot of people have looked at Perl and been unable to figure out what's going on, and why the same function returns different values sometimes when called with the same arguments[1], and not known what to make of it because many things work exactly as expected, especially for people familiar with C. This can be confusing to people that thought they were getting a handle on the language. The conclusion then is either they are failing to understand the language, or the language sucks. I imagine one choice is easier on the ego than the other. 1: Context. People skimp on the reading or targeted learning and context bites them in the ass, even if it's fairly simple once known.
EvanMiller 9y ago
I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time. Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers! https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html
- zokier 9y ago
  I applaud you for that, I feel like it would do good for most of the people here who are so quick to voice their opinion to actually try Perl6 out, as I get distinct feeling that majority probably haven't. I definitely feel the emotion here: "current of frustration that Perl 6 isn’t more widely adopted. There’s a kind of righteous indignation that the language is very good — so dammit (I’m projecting), when will people start taking us seriously? " despite not even being part of Perl 6 community in any way. So many are attacking it on such circumstantial, or even irrelevant, grounds instead of discussing the merits and failings of the language itself. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me frustrated (of tech world); people, myself included, scared to jump to new things, or even try out them leading to strong herd mentality. I suspect it is because everything has such strong network effects these days. And of course HN is kinda the worst because the business angle; there is always the question about if this makes commercial sense, which I'll admit might not be the strongest aspect of Perl6.
qaq 9y ago
Main source of optimism for Perl is Booking.com using it :0
- lizmat 9y ago
  That would be Booking.com.
  - qaq 9y ago
    thnx fixed
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
  Of course they're using Perl 5, not Perl 6.
systems 9y ago
how would one describe Perl 6 type system? Is it dynamically typed, optionally typed, statically typed?
- kbp 9y ago
  It has optional static typing: > sub f(Int $x) { $x + 1 } sub f (Int $x) { #`(Sub|140221097113944) ... } > sub g(Str $x) { f($x) } ===SORRY!=== Error while compiling: Calling f(Str) will never work with declared signature (Int $x)
- jerf 9y ago
  The Perl 6 answer to almost all such questions is simply "Yes". It is an incredible mess. Whether it is a glorious mess is something that we are finally coming up on the ability to determine.
- perlgeek 9y ago
  It's gradually typed. Which means there are dynamic type checks, and optional static type declarations as well. If the compiler can prove the outcome of a type check at compile time, it can throw a type error or optimize out the runtime check, depending on the outcome.
kstrauser 9y ago
Perl Pessimism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl I have happy memories of Perl, and it started me on the path that led to a nice career of Python awesomeness. Thanks, Perl! That said, I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I'd ever consider using it again. I almost certainly wouldn't use it professionally because it's not exactly going to light up a resume. Yes, there are still Perl shops. But no, there aren't very many of them, and I'd be highly suspicious of an engineering department still writing new code in it today without a very good reason.
- petre 9y ago
  We are one of those Perl shops. The reasons why we're still using it are: old codebase started in 2004, >95% rewritten, the language is stable, fast enough and it scaled well for our needs after we rewrote the web services using Mojolicious. I'd also pick Perl any day over PHP or Python. We also write a fair amount of Javascript on the frontend but moving the backend to Node.js doesn't add any benefits. It just makes things harder, having to track constantly moving targets, using many different tools to accomplish the same jobs, having to fork stuff just to get it to work properly.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    That’s on the short list of “oh, that makes sense” reasons.
- mattgreenrocks 9y ago
  I'd advise you to remain curious beyond what's good for your resume, especially if you want to stay sharp and ahead of the curve. Perl 6 has some neat features, particularly around grammars and parsing, that make those tools easier to use for day-to-day problems.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    To be sure! I’m not allergic to Perl and I like seeing the cool new stuff going on there. But afterward, I prefer to take those learnings and apply them to work I’m doing in other languages.
mrtweetyhack 9y ago
"with the help of a Perl 6 expert" So it's not backward compatible and you need an expert?
zekevermillion 9y ago
Perl 6 appeals to me enough to make it my first new language to study, after a 20-year hiatus from any meaningful programming. This could be taken as an anti-endorsement. But for someone with no legacy skills, and no legacy codebase to draw on, I can afford to be arbitrary. What sold me is the cheat of storing floating point numbers as rationals composed of integers. Also when I tried python I missed the curly braces.
scelerat 9y ago
Would people feel differently (lots of talk in here along the lines of "why bother at this point?") if Perl 6 had a completely different name?
vgy7ujm 9y ago
I hope that the Perl 6 core devs take notice of this and other threads from the past days. Somehow I think that the efforts have not been directed enough at things that perhaps are not that exciting for them but that matters a lot for potential users. Examples: - Better migration/transition from Perl 5 - Performance and stability - Killer features and explaining these thoroughly - Best in class tooling, editor support, super easy deployment I am sure there are efforts, but perhaps not enough to meet the demands? I say this of course realizing that resources in an open source project are limited. But something has to happen to accelerate the usage. Keep on writing more articles etc to spread information outside the P6 core dev echo chamber.
- lizmat 9y ago
  > Better migration/transition from Perl 5 This is what the CPAN Butterfly Plan is all about. And after that the Butterfly Perl 5 Project.
  - vgy7ujm 9y ago
    Yes but will it be enough? For many Perl is tied to Unix and IMO a transition for /usr/bin/perl would be key. I might not fully understand your plan but please do not throw away the "ubiquitous in Unix" legacy.
- cutler 9y ago
  Perl 6 is 5 times slower than Ruby in parsing a typical Apache log file with a regex. Text parsing with a regex was Perl's claim to fame but it seems to be last on Perl 6's list of priorities.
  - lizmat 9y ago
    Only 5 times now? I seem to recall it being 100x slower not too long ago.
    - vgy7ujm 9y ago
      Constructive criticism: Perl 6 needs to be at least as fast and preferably faster than the competition to start seeing some serious use outside the echo chamber. "Lets move to Perl 6 since it will cut our infrastructure costs in half. It will also cut our time to market in half due to the fantastic tooling." Thats the kind of things business decision makers need to hear.
shagie 9y ago
My first programming job was perl back in '97 for the LAMP stack. There was a lot of neat things that I did with it back then... and clever too. I remember writing a neat Tie::Array that was backed by a database... and then undoing it because it was too clever and not something that was maintainable. The last time I touched perl professionally was in '09 during the perl winter. The web stack was moving in other directions - especially that of Java (I'm a corporate back end line of business keep the gears of the company turning type). I write boring code - which is good. Boring code doesn't surprise people and when I pull it up from 10 years ago, it still works. I try to avoid clever code now - it takes too long to get back into the mindset that I had when I wrote it. I'll admit to one bit of clever code with annotations on an enum that I've written in the past half decade... and that is in place to force what would be runtime errors to be compile time errors instead. I looked at perl 6... there's even a bug report with my name on it ( https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/commit/8d04bec https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/commit/8d04bec ). I really want to like the language - it makes me think about some things differently... and here's the "but". But it all feels too clever. Code needs to be reasonable - something that I can come back to later and pick up again and continue on with minimal switching of the mind. Unicode operators, Junctions (as neat as they are), redefining operators... its letting me and encouraging me to write clever code. I pull up the docs and see things from https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators that make me wonder if its gone too far. There's more than one way to do it... but there are more of them than Java 8's list ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-15.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-15.htm... ). I feel that there's more than one way is "more than one approach" not "more than one way to type '+'". The code just doesn't feel reasonable anymore. For what its worth, after not touching perl professional since '09, this past week I was called on to fix a LAMP stack. There's the CGI with a nice 'use CGI.pm' (the last change time on the file was from 2011). I was able to open it up, read it, debug it, and fix it in under an hour. It was straight forward, sensible, and reasonable code. I shutter to think what it will be like in another decade if someone comes by and asks someone to debug some 10 year old perl6 code and they open it up to find unicode scattered through it and trying to remember what =~= or ∘ does. For my scripting needs now... I've been a Java coder for the past decade. When I want a script I'm more likely to fire up groovy. It runs, its stable, and it doesn't try to make me write clever code. Sorry perl... you're just not my go to language for thought to code anymore.. and thinking in perl6 just isn't something that I'll find myself easily writing once or being able to figure out when coming back to later.

157 points by vgy7ujm 9y ago

I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using python 2.x. In short, there’s no sensible upgrade path, Perl 5 & 6 are very much their own language. If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago. Trying to hack in some Perl 5 style functions into it now seems futile...

ionforce 9y ago
Should have chosen a different name for the language.
- yesbut 9y ago
  I feel that there should probably be a name change, but ultimately I don't really care. I am enjoying the language and they can call it whatever they want. If and when they change the name I will just refer to it as the new name.
- petre 9y ago
  There were numerous discussions about this and it was decided against it. Eventually one would use Perl 5 from inside Perl 6 with the "use v5" statement.
  - vgy7ujm 9y ago
    If this really had worked seamlessly it would be great. But that includes /usr/bin/perl working this way on every OS etc... with a clear&easy upgrade path for existing code.
    - petre 9y ago
      Well Perl 5 needs a spec in order to be supported inside Perl 5. Otherwise which version do you support? 5.6? 5.10.1? 5.16?
  - cthor 9y ago
    Clarification: Decided by the Perl 6 devs who want to keep the name and don't seem to care about the damage that decision does to Perl 5
    - petre 9y ago
      One of the discussion was on the Perl blogs[1]. Most of the devs there are Perl 5 devs and they also decided against the name change. Perl 6 is the next iteration of Perl that has been redesigned from the ground up. Why should it bare a different name? Yes, the redesign took more than a decade and it's incompatible with Perl 5, but so is Python 3.6 compared to 2.7, albeit to a lesser extent. Even Perl 5.26 has changed a lot since 5.6. In fact the least common denominator is 5.10.1. Using older versions is discouraged since they're largely unsupported by the majority of CPAN modules. 1. http://blogs.perl.org http://blogs.perl.org
      - cthor 9y ago
        The most recent discussion I saw on this subject[1] makes it very clear that there isn't a consensus. If there is, it's in the "Perl 6 should rename" direction. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter_to_the_perl_community/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter...
      - vorg 9y ago
        > Yes, the redesign took more than a decade Quite true! In fact, the redesign took more than a decade and a half (July 2000 to Dec 2015). A record worth breaking!
    - virtualsue 9y ago
      It was a decision made by Larry Wall alone.Since it’s his language, he’s allowed to do that.
- corpMaverick 9y ago
  A new name would have kept momentum in Perl 5 and it would have made Perl 6 more sexy. It is sad, Perl is amazing, I still use it as my personal scripting language. Back in the day I wrote complete enterprise applications.
- sampo 9y ago
  > Should have chosen a different name for the language. I wonder if Fortran 2008 wasn't called Fortran, could it be sold to computer science people as a "fast, type-checked matlab".
- emmelaich 9y ago
  What ... like Ruby? :-) Perl6 has some compatibility -- at the wetware level. Which is not nothing.
zura 9y ago
You can actually use Perl 5 and even Python modules from Perl 6: https://github.com/niner https://github.com/niner
- joosters 9y ago
  There are gotchas and unsupported functionality (e.g. 'since Perl 6 does not have the same concept of "context", Perl 5 methods are always called in list context.') which effectively mean that you've got no idea if library 'foo' will work or not without a thorough review of the code. At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon. There's still no sane upgrade path here.
  - lizmat 9y ago
    > At best, it's a hack. Impressive, sure, but not something that you could rely upon. The same could be said for XS. And I do think that all of Perl 5 is relying upon that. > There's still no sane upgrade path here. FWIW, my blog post https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to-the-perl-community/ https://www.perl.com/article/an-open-letter-to-the-perl-comm... touches on that subject.
    - jerf 9y ago
      XS is the "same" hack all the time, though. A Perl library that can only be called in list context in Perl 6 is a substantial change from Perl 5. I've seen much smaller changes trash code bases before. I've got real code that would be affected by that. (I also think the context idea was a misfire in Perl <6, but as long as it is there, I've sometimes written code that had to deal with it.) That said, why is it impossible to call a Perl 5 function in scalar context? Shouldn't the equivalent of Perl 5's "scalar" be fairly easy to implement? It may stink to have to manually use it, but it wouldn't be very often, and it's easy enough to use any of half-a-dozen Perl 6 features to minimize the syntactic hit.
      - raiph 9y ago
        > why is it impossible to call a Perl 5 function in scalar context? Has Stefan (who wrote IP5) said or written that it's impossible? 18 months ago he wrote "So far I've found 3 different ways to implement scalar/list context for method/function calls".[1] He has left issue #31 open.[2] Where did you read that it's impossible? [1] https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-08-03#i_12961486 https://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2016-08-03#i_12961486 [2] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/issues/31 https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5/issues/31
simias 9y ago
Pretty much. I used to use Perl 5 a lot but I never considered using Perl 6 and eventually moved on from the Perl ecosystem altogether. The huge advantage of Perl ~10 years ago was the massive amount of CPAN packages but in the meantime python & friends mostly caught up in my experience. Meanwhile the shiny new revolutionary Perl 6 took forever to release and when it finally did nobody cared anymore. Quoting Wikipedia: >The design process for Perl 6 began in 2000. [...] on December 25, 2015, the first stable version of the specification was announced. I can respect taking the time to do things right but when your development history resembles that of Duke Nukem Forever something is off. That in my opinion hurt Perl more than anything else, even more so than the lack of compatibility between Perl 5 and Perl 6. If Perl 6 had released in early-to-mid 2000 I think there would've been enough interest out there to bridge the gap. It would've been messy but it could've worked. Instead Perl 5 felt a bit like a legacy language "while we wait for Perl 6 to be finished" and Perl 6 was nowhere to be found. And Perl went from the de-facto scripting language for un*x to people asking "Is Rakudo Perl 6 used in production?".
- joosters 9y ago
  I agree, it definitely hurt mainline Perl development when Perl 6 was this promised great new thing. At least Perl 5 never got abandoned, and there is development and bugfixing still going on today. Perl 5 has a feeling of being 'complete' as a language. I guess this makes it unsexy and it'll never be the cutting edge where all the cool devs want to work, but it's rock solid stable and reliable. Now, if only Perl 5 could get a JIT compiler...
  - toyg 9y ago
    > I guess this makes it unsexy Nah, what makes it unsexy is the Perl syntax. The world has moved on. The readability of modern languages like Python is on another level.
    - vgy7ujm 9y ago
      I disagree. To me Perl is more readable than Python. What is so modern about Python? It was released in 1991.
jbucaran 9y ago
Yeah, but I think it's because they have the same name, only the number on the right is different and people tend to assume that Perl 6 is the one after 5.
alien_at_work 9y ago
>I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. A lot of people seem to have forgotten, or maybe they weren't around for it, but when Larry anounced Perl 6 it wasn't for a totally different language. It was the next version of Perl. Just as Perl 5 was to Perl 4, and 4 was to 3 and so on. This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is something people started saying when it was clear that Perl 6 wasn't just around the corner.
- dkarl 9y ago
  Almost. Perl 6 was always meant to be a step beyond Perl 5 rather than just an extension or evolution, but initially, Perl 5 was supposed to be a supported syntax. It would be one of many supported by the runtime, and the primary syntax people meant when they said "Perl 6" was going to be a clean break from the past — which excited many people such as myself who despised Perl 5 while envying its terseness — but the underlying engine was supposed to support Perl 5 with seamless interop from Perl 6. When they gave that up, they needed to work out a completely new plan for maintaining interest and driving adoption, but instead of reassessing they seem to have decided "who cares, it's gonna be so awesome that it won't matter." It might work, but I'm not holding my breath.
- raiph 9y ago
  > when Larry anounced Perl 6 ... ... he very clearly emphasized that it was NOT just the next version of Perl, in contrast with his approach with earlier Perls. > This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is something people started saying when it was clear that Perl 6 wasn't just around the corner. I think it's just a chinese whispers effect. To folk who paid attention to what Larry said on day one, it was obvious that P5 and P6 were (are) not the same and are not totally different either and are related. Around a decade ago some folk began repeating the mantra that P5 and P6 were different languages in the same family. The hope was that this would help. But some folk don't like nuance so they arrived at clearly made up and extreme views like "completely different language ... no relation with 5".
unixhero 9y ago
It's the spiritual successor
raiph 9y ago
> Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language P5 and P6 have been explicitly different languages since day one[1]. As Larry Wall said, "We had to make almost everything [in Perl 5] ... backward compatible [with previous Perls] ... But now it’s the first chance to [break bug-for-bug syntactic and semantic compatibility] and ... I think we should [take the chance]." > There’s no compatibility between the two. None? With an appropriately compiled perl 5 binary installed one can install regular Perl 5 modules from CPAN and use them as if they were Perl 6 modules: use Some:Perl5::Module:from<Perl5> ; How is this not compatible? > You can’t write a library that works in both versions Even the large complex Perl 5 package Catalyst works in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 per the above. > so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful Per the above, the majority of CPAN just works 100% correctly out of the box. > If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago. P6ers thought about backward compatibility with Perl 5 from day one[1]. [1] https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/ https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/
makecheck 9y ago
Also, how would similar functions even be enough? The average Perl script I had was full of special operators, etc. (they all changed and are impossible to Google anyway). And code bases have more than enough churn without being fundamentally rewritten multiple times to do the same thing.

sunseb 9y ago

Is Perl 6 sill so damn slow?

yesbut 9y ago
Performance has improved a lot since the initial release: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/day-16-%F0%9F%8E%B6-deck-the-halls-with-perf-improvements-%F0%9F%8E%B6/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/day-16-%F0%9F%8...
- fnord123 9y ago
  Performance improved a lot but it's still very bad. e.g. there is some csv-game[1] where there is perl6 code that used to take 16 minutes but now 'only' takes 5 minutes. perl5 completes the task in <3s. [1] https://bitbucket.org/ewanhiggs/csv-game/src/9604dc176b6303ef9fcee1d9fc46d40bc786a569/perl/?at=master https://bitbucket.org/ewanhiggs/csv-game/src/9604dc176b6303e...
  - lizmat 9y ago
    https://twitter.com/zoffix/status/955290358434451456 https://twitter.com/zoffix/status/955290358434451456
  - petre 9y ago
    Too bad there are is no P6 code on the benchmarks game[1]. Probably a good opportunity to learn P6. https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org
    - igouy 9y ago
      "If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements." https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex Like this guy does -- https://pybenchmarks.org/ https://pybenchmarks.org/

stesch 9y ago

I'm still wondering why they use non ASCII characters for operators.

yesbut 9y ago
Perl 6 has ASCII versions of every unicode operator: https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii
- collyw 9y ago
  Is there a key for it on my keyboard though?
  - perlgeek 9y ago
    Hey, we have docs for that :-) https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode#Entering_Unicode_Codepoints_and_Codepoint_Sequences https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode#Entering_Unicode_Cod...
  - yesbut 9y ago
    yes, all of the ASCII characters are standard on most keyboards.
  - sedachv 9y ago
    Here is a nickel kid, get yourself a real text editor: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/International.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/In... Do you realize people that speak more than two languages already use multiple keyboard layouts all of the time?
yorwba 9y ago
Why not? It's a neat way of showing off fundamental Unicode support, and AFAIK there are ASCII equivalents for all of them, in case you have no idea how to enter ⤐ or whatever.
- 9y ago

baybal2 9y ago

I used perl when dinosaurs still roamed the land. Can somebody explain why it took so long for Perl 6? I read first p6/parrot vm textbook as a schoolboy more than a decade ago.

c256 9y ago
Honestly? Because Perl 5 was ‘good enough’ and widely installed, and then critical mass moved on to python and JavaScript (which both then developed their own version skew issues).
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  you mean php? :)
rurban 9y ago
Because parrot development was mismanaged and ran into ground. Similar to perl5 management in the last 15 years.
- vgy7ujm 9y ago
  Is there any hope of seeing your cperl efforts in mainstream perl? Would you be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back?
  - rurban 9y ago
    You have to ask them. They are the ones refusing any changes and cooperation, and are still actively destructive. In parrot the destructive people eventually burned out, and I could fix much stuff, but the big changes from around 2.7, the calling convention and the jit and runloop removal was eventually too much.
  - ribasushi 9y ago
    > be able to disregard recent history with p5p if you were welcomed back It is essentially impossible to do so, as the problems are systemic and run extraordinarily deep. Would you honestly consider any possibility of working on a "level" with people like this: https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2018/01/msg248689.html https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2018/01/m... So I can't fault rurban for walking away. The project still has merit. Its current leadership - none.

cousin_it 9y ago

Another year, another chance for all involved to learn the important rationality skill of recognizing sunk costs and opportunity costs, and give up when giving up is the best option. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx/just_lose_hope_already/

melling 9y ago
Perl 6 was announced in the year 2000. 18 years is a long time. It should be a case study for software developers. I don’t know if they should give up. Haven’t looked at Perl 6 in about 5 years. The best thing the community could do would be to turn the language into the solution to a particular problem: Web development, machine learning, etc Sure, anyone could build everything from scratch, but that’s usually not a good idea.
- rwmj 9y ago
  Why? Open source developers can work on whatever they want.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I went to OScon in something like 2009 or 10 and someone working on the python interpreter they were gonna share with Perl got on stage and showed how the roadmap and their velocity wouldn’t have Perl 6 done until 2016. This kind of crazy has been identified in the ecosystem for a while.
perlgeek 9y ago
If Perl 6 were a centrally managed and funded effort to create a popular language, I would a agree that the one who funds it would look at adoption numbers and time spent, and declare it sunk cost, and try to achieve their objectives through other means. But everybody who's working on Perl 6 does it because they enjoy it, learn by doing it etc. Why should they declare it a failure? Usage numbers are slowly, slowly creeping up, and working with and on Perl 6 can be real fun. If I'd work on it regardless on how much of my previous time I invested in it, why should I even consider sunk costs?

bigbluedots 9y ago

Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?

zimpenfish 9y ago
Perl 5? Off the top of my head: Deutsche Bank, Broadbean, Photobox, BBC, Booking.com, Net-A-Porter. I'm sure a more enthusiastic Perl user can provide a surfeit of examples.
- vgy7ujm 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo, ZipRecruiter
  - dmux 9y ago
    Athenahealth
    - geoffc 9y ago
      OpenAir, Ambrahealth
- theOnliest 9y ago
  All of FastMail is in Perl5 (minus the Cyrus parts, which are in C).
- latenightcoding 9y ago
  NVIDIA, Shutterstock, Symantec, Amadeus IT Group, Bank of America
ryanianian 9y ago
A surprisingly huge amount of the Amazon.com codebase is Perl 5. The various back-ends are primarily in Java, but most front-end code is Perl/Mason.
- 9y ago

crusso 9y ago

I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it. That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days? Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby a decade ago and saying, "Wow, programming just got fun again"? I'd love to see a Perl 6 breakthrough, but honestly it feels like those attempts to keep BeOS going... too little, too late. Its time has passed.

vgy7ujm 9y ago
Perl 5 is still as fun as ever. And newer things like Mojolicious keeps adding to the goodness.
- petre 9y ago
  Yes, Perl 5 is still fun, but I really like the chaining and FP in Perl 6, much like autobox but native. And native sets, rational number math instead of floating point math, the ability to use huge numbers without BigNum and lots of other awesoneness.
0x445442 9y ago
Actually, I've been looking at Perl 6 and I think it's quite amazing. It's really the only language outside those I get paid to work with that I've considered doing a deep dive on. I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story. For example can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars in Python, Ruby, Groovy etc? Also, https://modules.perl6.org/ https://modules.perl6.org/ seems to be growing.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story. I think far more likely is the people that have decided to dislike "Perl" are letting their prejudice leak. Perl 5 is one of those languages that is hides complexity, partially by accident. I'm sure a lot of people have looked at Perl and been unable to figure out what's going on, and why the same function returns different values sometimes when called with the same arguments[1], and not known what to make of it because many things work exactly as expected, especially for people familiar with C. This can be confusing to people that thought they were getting a handle on the language. The conclusion then is either they are failing to understand the language, or the language sucks. I imagine one choice is easier on the ego than the other. 1: Context. People skimp on the reading or targeted learning and context bites them in the ass, even if it's fairly simple once known.

EvanMiller 9y ago

I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time. Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's merits, which are many. I'm told many of my criticisms have been addressed in the five months since the article was published, but perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the original review. Cheers! https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html

zokier 9y ago
I applaud you for that, I feel like it would do good for most of the people here who are so quick to voice their opinion to actually try Perl6 out, as I get distinct feeling that majority probably haven't. I definitely feel the emotion here: "current of frustration that Perl 6 isn’t more widely adopted. There’s a kind of righteous indignation that the language is very good — so dammit (I’m projecting), when will people start taking us seriously? " despite not even being part of Perl 6 community in any way. So many are attacking it on such circumstantial, or even irrelevant, grounds instead of discussing the merits and failings of the language itself. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me frustrated (of tech world); people, myself included, scared to jump to new things, or even try out them leading to strong herd mentality. I suspect it is because everything has such strong network effects these days. And of course HN is kinda the worst because the business angle; there is always the question about if this makes commercial sense, which I'll admit might not be the strongest aspect of Perl6.

qaq 9y ago

Main source of optimism for Perl is Booking.com using it :0

lizmat 9y ago
That would be Booking.com.
- qaq 9y ago
  thnx fixed
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
Of course they're using Perl 5, not Perl 6.

systems 9y ago

how would one describe Perl 6 type system? Is it dynamically typed, optionally typed, statically typed?

kbp 9y ago
It has optional static typing: > sub f(Int $x) { $x + 1 } sub f (Int $x) { #`(Sub|140221097113944) ... } > sub g(Str $x) { f($x) } ===SORRY!=== Error while compiling: Calling f(Str) will never work with declared signature (Int $x)
jerf 9y ago
The Perl 6 answer to almost all such questions is simply "Yes". It is an incredible mess. Whether it is a glorious mess is something that we are finally coming up on the ability to determine.
perlgeek 9y ago
It's gradually typed. Which means there are dynamic type checks, and optional static type declarations as well. If the compiler can prove the outcome of a type check at compile time, it can throw a type error or optimize out the runtime check, depending on the outcome.

kstrauser 9y ago

Perl Pessimism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl I have happy memories of Perl, and it started me on the path that led to a nice career of Python awesomeness. Thanks, Perl! That said, I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I'd ever consider using it again. I almost certainly wouldn't use it professionally because it's not exactly going to light up a resume. Yes, there are still Perl shops. But no, there aren't very many of them, and I'd be highly suspicious of an engineering department still writing new code in it today without a very good reason.

petre 9y ago
We are one of those Perl shops. The reasons why we're still using it are: old codebase started in 2004, >95% rewritten, the language is stable, fast enough and it scaled well for our needs after we rewrote the web services using Mojolicious. I'd also pick Perl any day over PHP or Python. We also write a fair amount of Javascript on the frontend but moving the backend to Node.js doesn't add any benefits. It just makes things harder, having to track constantly moving targets, using many different tools to accomplish the same jobs, having to fork stuff just to get it to work properly.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  That’s on the short list of “oh, that makes sense” reasons.
mattgreenrocks 9y ago
I'd advise you to remain curious beyond what's good for your resume, especially if you want to stay sharp and ahead of the curve. Perl 6 has some neat features, particularly around grammars and parsing, that make those tools easier to use for day-to-day problems.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  To be sure! I’m not allergic to Perl and I like seeing the cool new stuff going on there. But afterward, I prefer to take those learnings and apply them to work I’m doing in other languages.

mrtweetyhack 9y ago

"with the help of a Perl 6 expert" So it's not backward compatible and you need an expert?

zekevermillion 9y ago

Perl 6 appeals to me enough to make it my first new language to study, after a 20-year hiatus from any meaningful programming. This could be taken as an anti-endorsement. But for someone with no legacy skills, and no legacy codebase to draw on, I can afford to be arbitrary. What sold me is the cheat of storing floating point numbers as rationals composed of integers. Also when I tried python I missed the curly braces.

scelerat 9y ago

Would people feel differently (lots of talk in here along the lines of "why bother at this point?") if Perl 6 had a completely different name?

vgy7ujm 9y ago

I hope that the Perl 6 core devs take notice of this and other threads from the past days. Somehow I think that the efforts have not been directed enough at things that perhaps are not that exciting for them but that matters a lot for potential users. Examples: - Better migration/transition from Perl 5 - Performance and stability - Killer features and explaining these thoroughly - Best in class tooling, editor support, super easy deployment I am sure there are efforts, but perhaps not enough to meet the demands? I say this of course realizing that resources in an open source project are limited. But something has to happen to accelerate the usage. Keep on writing more articles etc to spread information outside the P6 core dev echo chamber.

lizmat 9y ago
> Better migration/transition from Perl 5 This is what the CPAN Butterfly Plan is all about. And after that the Butterfly Perl 5 Project.
- vgy7ujm 9y ago
  Yes but will it be enough? For many Perl is tied to Unix and IMO a transition for /usr/bin/perl would be key. I might not fully understand your plan but please do not throw away the "ubiquitous in Unix" legacy.
cutler 9y ago
Perl 6 is 5 times slower than Ruby in parsing a typical Apache log file with a regex. Text parsing with a regex was Perl's claim to fame but it seems to be last on Perl 6's list of priorities.
- lizmat 9y ago
  Only 5 times now? I seem to recall it being 100x slower not too long ago.
  - vgy7ujm 9y ago
    Constructive criticism: Perl 6 needs to be at least as fast and preferably faster than the competition to start seeing some serious use outside the echo chamber. "Lets move to Perl 6 since it will cut our infrastructure costs in half. It will also cut our time to market in half due to the fantastic tooling." Thats the kind of things business decision makers need to hear.

shagie 9y ago

My first programming job was perl back in '97 for the LAMP stack. There was a lot of neat things that I did with it back then... and clever too. I remember writing a neat Tie::Array that was backed by a database... and then undoing it because it was too clever and not something that was maintainable. The last time I touched perl professionally was in '09 during the perl winter. The web stack was moving in other directions - especially that of Java (I'm a corporate back end line of business keep the gears of the company turning type). I write boring code - which is good. Boring code doesn't surprise people and when I pull it up from 10 years ago, it still works. I try to avoid clever code now - it takes too long to get back into the mindset that I had when I wrote it. I'll admit to one bit of clever code with annotations on an enum that I've written in the past half decade... and that is in place to force what would be runtime errors to be compile time errors instead. I looked at perl 6... there's even a bug report with my name on it ( https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/commit/8d04bec https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/commit/8d04bec ). I really want to like the language - it makes me think about some things differently... and here's the "but". But it all feels too clever. Code needs to be reasonable - something that I can come back to later and pick up again and continue on with minimal switching of the mind. Unicode operators, Junctions (as neat as they are), redefining operators... its letting me and encouraging me to write clever code. I pull up the docs and see things from https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators that make me wonder if its gone too far. There's more than one way to do it... but there are more of them than Java 8's list ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-15.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-15.htm... ). I feel that there's more than one way is "more than one approach" not "more than one way to type '+'". The code just doesn't feel reasonable anymore. For what its worth, after not touching perl professional since '09, this past week I was called on to fix a LAMP stack. There's the CGI with a nice 'use CGI.pm' (the last change time on the file was from 2011). I was able to open it up, read it, debug it, and fix it in under an hour. It was straight forward, sensible, and reasonable code. I shutter to think what it will be like in another decade if someone comes by and asks someone to debug some 10 year old perl6 code and they open it up to find unicode scattered through it and trying to remember what =~= or ∘ does. For my scripting needs now... I've been a Java coder for the past decade. When I want a script I'm more likely to fire up groovy. It runs, its stable, and it doesn't try to make me write clever code. Sorry perl... you're just not my go to language for thought to code anymore.. and thinking in perl6 just isn't something that I'll find myself easily writing once or being able to figure out when coming back to later.