6 ms·

Frankly speaking its surprising Perl 6 hasn't taken off yet. Its a language which has Java like potential. Not sure where the efficiency/speed story has gone so

by kamaal 7y ago

Frankly speaking its surprising Perl 6 hasn't taken off yet. Its a language which has Java like potential. Not sure where the efficiency/speed story has gone so far(Which was preventing adoption?). But pretty much any one I have shown the language has been floored by it so far. I guess a killer framework is lacking too.

coldtea 7y ago
Surprising? 1) The Perl 5 community itself was dwindling before Perl 6. 2) Perl 6 took a good chunk of time to arrive. 3) It's still not 100% baked. 4) Perl 6 is mostly a different language. 5) Perl in general doesn't have a good "name" with todays devs 6) There's no killer app 7) Python got the data/science niche, Node got the web/services niche, Go got the backend niche - what's left for Perl 6? 8) The libs are also lacking. 9) Too complex to begin with (kitchen sink offering), at a time when devs started valuing simplicity more than before. 10) Maturity of implementation, tooling, support, etc. 11) No major commercial backing...
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  In a nutshell: unlike Perl itself, it wasn't created to solve a problem. Its purpose was to "keep the gang together". Imagine a start-up that didn't set out to solve a problem... So it's a kind of research language - which is important and has its place.
  - lizmat 7y ago
    > So it's a kind of research language - which is important and has its place I'd rather say that Perl 6 is an inspirational language. With other languages stealing ideas and features from it. But also a complete, production ready language on its own. Based on MoarVM, a virtual machine specifically designed to run Perl 6 on, but with more general applicability as well. And with some exciting developments for the GSOC: one of which should allow creation of a single executable for a Perl 6 application on Linux / MacOS and Windows.
    - hyperpallium 7y ago
      Quite a lot of ideas came out of lisp, though lisp itself remains niche. What ideas have come out of Perl 6?
      - lizmat 7y ago
        - grammars, mutable at that - simple declarative class definitions - easy to use async primitives - easy to use event driven primitives - unicode support based on graphemes
- kamaal 7y ago
  >> 1) The Perl 5 community itself was dwindling before Perl 6. https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent More people are writing Perl everyday than may be even Java, Let's put this Perl is dwindling argument to rest. Perl's niche, more like empire is glue language for anything Unix. That is a huge empire to govern on. Unless Unix is going away, Perl is here to stay. >> 5) Perl in general doesn't have a good "name" with todays devs >> Node got the web/services niche Most dynamic languages are in the same bucket. Today everybody is hesitant to start any serious big project in a dynamic programming language. Even in case of JavaScript most things will move to TypeScript eventually. And that too is more or less a totally new language. >>Go got the backend niche Go got nothing. Heck, merely shell scripting exceeds Go usage by several multiplicative factors. >> 7) Python got the data/science niche Most of the use case for Python's 'Data science' library is basically spread sheet automation. Perl has been used to that kind of work since early 90s. >>what's left for Perl 6? Firstly, and entire universe exists outside of web development. And most that universe is far more exciting than majority of api and json plumbing work in web dev work. Secondly, Not sure, but no one can rebut an argument that says there is no scope for any new software to be ever written anymore.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >More people are writing Perl everyday than may be even Java, Let's put this Perl is dwindling argument to rest. Err, that's just a link to a submissions page. That's not a statistic, and it doesn't even show if Perl kept its people or lost them. Perl could even have more people than 1999, but much smaller mindshare given how hugely larger the dev market is in 2019 vs 1999. Actual long term analysis look like "Perl is dwindling" is right: https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/05/perl-uncertain-future-tiobe-index/ https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/05/perl-uncertain-future-t... >Perl's niche, more like empire is glue language for anything Unix. That is a huge empire to govern on. And that "empire" is already lost for Perl. Dev ops have moved to Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc, and Python and other languages are used as the glue. The "Perl gluing admin" is a relic. >Most of the use case for Python's 'Data science' library is basically spread sheet automation. Perl has been used to that kind of work since early 90s. Which is irrelevant as to who does it now (and it's not even right, Pandas, Numpy and co are not "spread sheet automation"). >Most dynamic languages are in the same bucket. Today everybody is hesitant to start any serious big project in a dynamic programming language. Actually millions start serious big projects in JS, Python and other dynamic languages. There's a movement towards static typing but not that strong in actual practice. Typescript is tiny compared to the size of greenfield JS being written. >Firstly, and entire universe exists outside of web development. And most that universe is far more exciting than majority of api and json plumbing work in web dev work. Also far smaller, devs wise. And I didn't just mention web work, but also data science, microservices, and so on. (And my point wasn't that Perl 6 can't do those, but that people aren't doing those with Perl 6 -- people as in, "people in quantities large enough to matter").
- lizmat 7y ago
  > 6) There's no killer app Have you looked at Cro? Cro is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all Perl 6 has to offer. The high level APIs make the easy things easy, and the asynchronous pipeline concept at Cro's heart makes the hard things possible. https://cro.services https://cro.services . With HTTP/1.1 / HTTPS, HTTP/2.0 and Web Sockets support out the box. > 10) Maturity of implementation, tooling, support, etc. Comma is an IDE for Perl 6, based on the JetBrains platform, with detailed syntax highlighting, grammar support, auto-completion, refactoring support, integrated test runner / graphical debugger, stack explorer and direct profiling. https://commaide.com https://commaide.com
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >* Have you looked at Cro? Cro is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all Perl 6 has to offer. The high level APIs make the easy things easy, and the asynchronous pipeline concept at Cro's heart makes the hard things possible. https://cro.services https://cro.services . With HTTP/1.1 / HTTPS, HTTP/2.0 and Web Sockets support out the box.* None of that seems "killer app", or anything more impressive than what e.g. Node or Golang offer out of the box...
- agumonkey 7y ago
  12) performance ? last I heard it was still alpha/prototyping so perf was no concern 13) perl6 is above most mainstream languages conceptually, people aren't ready to use it IMO
  - b2gills 7y ago
    For some benchmarks Perl6 is faster than Perl5. One person posted to #perl6 on freenode.net code written in both Perl6 and C/C++. They reported that the Perl6 code was faster. (I'm sure that the difference is mainly because the C/C++ code had to copy strings around, and iterate over them to locate the null terminators.) Unless you are doing something where you might consider writing parts of it in assembly, Perl6 may be fast enough already. (I wouldn't write a first person shooter in it yet.) There are some parts of it that are still in need of optimization. (If you find something that is egregiously slow, file a bug report.)
    - SwellJoe 7y ago
      Startup time is still egregiously slow compared to Perl 5. But, that couldn't be a major determining factor for people working in languages that are also slow to start (of which there are many, probably one could say most are slower than Perl 5). And, it's not a major concern for long-running applications and services, but for one-liners it feel sluggish.
      - lizmat 7y ago
        If you realize that Perl 6 basically has Moose in its core, and you compare startup time of Perl 5 with Moose with Perl 6, then it's not that bad at all: $ time perl6 -e '' real 0m0.120s $ time perl -MMoose -e '' real 0m0.131s And that's without all of the fancy type checking stuff of several Moose plugins that comes standard with Perl 6. So in that sense, if you are interested in Moose functionality, you're better of in Perl 6.
lloeki 7y ago
Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst. There's also Plack/PSGI, a Rack/WSGI equivalent, making new frameworks able to pop in more easily.
- tadzik_ 7y ago
  Those are all Perl 5 techs though – somewhat usable (or partially reimplemented) in Perl 6, but having written both for a living the Perl 6 ones are still way, way behind.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    I do agree that Perl 6 could use some framework. But then Go did not need one to take off so I'm definitely not convinced it would help. Perl 6 is an entirely different language though - IMHO a mistake to call it Perl at all, it's just so confusing outside of the community, but the damage is done with no obvious way to fix that, making people think it's kind of a Python 2 to Python 3 breaking change - so it's like saying Crystal does not run Rails. One has to think of it as 'Perl6', not 'Perl v6.0'. Perl (the language whose current version is 5.22) is very much alive and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, regardless of progress of 'Rakudo Perl 6'. https://perl6.party/post/The-Hot-New-Language-Named-Rakudo https://perl6.party/post/The-Hot-New-Language-Named-Rakudo
    - vorg 7y ago
      > using all-lowercase letters for the compiler and title case for the language 'rakudo' is an implementation of 'Rakudo', huh? It's only natural for one to tag the specification and an implemention of it with different nouns in one's mind, even when there's only one implementation. I tend to think of 'go' being the reference implementation of the language called 'Golang', although its Google backers don't differentiate their official names.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        > 'rakudo' is an implementation of 'Rakudo', huh? It's only natural for one to tag the specification and an implemention of it with different nouns in one's mind I get your point theoretically, yet this is not without significant previous occurences: from the top of my head 'Java', 'Ruby', 'Python', 'Go', 'Lua' the languages have 'java', 'ruby', 'python', 'go', 'lua' as the official implementations†. Alternative names for the implementations are merely informal. People even still call the official Ruby implementation 'MRI' when it's not that anymore ever since 1.9 (It's actually YARV or KRI). TBH 'Golang' is more of a search engine hack. Regarding Perl 6 they could have done so too, but they locked in on theory and wanted to leverage Perl's heritage, which backfired hard. IMHO had they done some initial announcement like "Meet Rakudo, Perls' heir", they would have achieved the same goal with none of the drawbacks. Now the community web has built itself around the Perl 6 name so it's too late. † I'm perfectly aware that there are significant other examples though, like Common Lisp, Haskell, C, C++ that make that distinction. But then again, many of those implementations turn out to have specifics implemented that turns the actual implementation into a slight to extensive variant of the language, which turns into its own bag of hurts. Naming things definitely is Hard.
jlv2 7y ago
Perl 6 has been coming for almost 2 decades. Whole other language ecosystems have risen and fallen in that time.

by kamaal 7y ago

coldtea 7y ago

Surprising? 1) The Perl 5 community itself was dwindling before Perl 6. 2) Perl 6 took a good chunk of time to arrive. 3) It's still not 100% baked. 4) Perl 6 is mostly a different language. 5) Perl in general doesn't have a good "name" with todays devs 6) There's no killer app 7) Python got the data/science niche, Node got the web/services niche, Go got the backend niche - what's left for Perl 6? 8) The libs are also lacking. 9) Too complex to begin with (kitchen sink offering), at a time when devs started valuing simplicity more than before. 10) Maturity of implementation, tooling, support, etc. 11) No major commercial backing...

hyperpallium 7y ago
In a nutshell: unlike Perl itself, it wasn't created to solve a problem. Its purpose was to "keep the gang together". Imagine a start-up that didn't set out to solve a problem... So it's a kind of research language - which is important and has its place.
- lizmat 7y ago
  > So it's a kind of research language - which is important and has its place I'd rather say that Perl 6 is an inspirational language. With other languages stealing ideas and features from it. But also a complete, production ready language on its own. Based on MoarVM, a virtual machine specifically designed to run Perl 6 on, but with more general applicability as well. And with some exciting developments for the GSOC: one of which should allow creation of a single executable for a Perl 6 application on Linux / MacOS and Windows.
  - hyperpallium 7y ago
    Quite a lot of ideas came out of lisp, though lisp itself remains niche. What ideas have come out of Perl 6?
    - lizmat 7y ago
      - grammars, mutable at that - simple declarative class definitions - easy to use async primitives - easy to use event driven primitives - unicode support based on graphemes
kamaal 7y ago
>> 1) The Perl 5 community itself was dwindling before Perl 6. https://metacpan.org/recent https://metacpan.org/recent More people are writing Perl everyday than may be even Java, Let's put this Perl is dwindling argument to rest. Perl's niche, more like empire is glue language for anything Unix. That is a huge empire to govern on. Unless Unix is going away, Perl is here to stay. >> 5) Perl in general doesn't have a good "name" with todays devs >> Node got the web/services niche Most dynamic languages are in the same bucket. Today everybody is hesitant to start any serious big project in a dynamic programming language. Even in case of JavaScript most things will move to TypeScript eventually. And that too is more or less a totally new language. >>Go got the backend niche Go got nothing. Heck, merely shell scripting exceeds Go usage by several multiplicative factors. >> 7) Python got the data/science niche Most of the use case for Python's 'Data science' library is basically spread sheet automation. Perl has been used to that kind of work since early 90s. >>what's left for Perl 6? Firstly, and entire universe exists outside of web development. And most that universe is far more exciting than majority of api and json plumbing work in web dev work. Secondly, Not sure, but no one can rebut an argument that says there is no scope for any new software to be ever written anymore.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >More people are writing Perl everyday than may be even Java, Let's put this Perl is dwindling argument to rest. Err, that's just a link to a submissions page. That's not a statistic, and it doesn't even show if Perl kept its people or lost them. Perl could even have more people than 1999, but much smaller mindshare given how hugely larger the dev market is in 2019 vs 1999. Actual long term analysis look like "Perl is dwindling" is right: https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/05/perl-uncertain-future-tiobe-index/ https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/05/perl-uncertain-future-t... >Perl's niche, more like empire is glue language for anything Unix. That is a huge empire to govern on. And that "empire" is already lost for Perl. Dev ops have moved to Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc, and Python and other languages are used as the glue. The "Perl gluing admin" is a relic. >Most of the use case for Python's 'Data science' library is basically spread sheet automation. Perl has been used to that kind of work since early 90s. Which is irrelevant as to who does it now (and it's not even right, Pandas, Numpy and co are not "spread sheet automation"). >Most dynamic languages are in the same bucket. Today everybody is hesitant to start any serious big project in a dynamic programming language. Actually millions start serious big projects in JS, Python and other dynamic languages. There's a movement towards static typing but not that strong in actual practice. Typescript is tiny compared to the size of greenfield JS being written. >Firstly, and entire universe exists outside of web development. And most that universe is far more exciting than majority of api and json plumbing work in web dev work. Also far smaller, devs wise. And I didn't just mention web work, but also data science, microservices, and so on. (And my point wasn't that Perl 6 can't do those, but that people aren't doing those with Perl 6 -- people as in, "people in quantities large enough to matter").
lizmat 7y ago
> 6) There's no killer app Have you looked at Cro? Cro is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all Perl 6 has to offer. The high level APIs make the easy things easy, and the asynchronous pipeline concept at Cro's heart makes the hard things possible. https://cro.services https://cro.services . With HTTP/1.1 / HTTPS, HTTP/2.0 and Web Sockets support out the box. > 10) Maturity of implementation, tooling, support, etc. Comma is an IDE for Perl 6, based on the JetBrains platform, with detailed syntax highlighting, grammar support, auto-completion, refactoring support, integrated test runner / graphical debugger, stack explorer and direct profiling. https://commaide.com https://commaide.com
- coldtea 7y ago
  >* Have you looked at Cro? Cro is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all Perl 6 has to offer. The high level APIs make the easy things easy, and the asynchronous pipeline concept at Cro's heart makes the hard things possible. https://cro.services https://cro.services . With HTTP/1.1 / HTTPS, HTTP/2.0 and Web Sockets support out the box.* None of that seems "killer app", or anything more impressive than what e.g. Node or Golang offer out of the box...
agumonkey 7y ago
12) performance ? last I heard it was still alpha/prototyping so perf was no concern 13) perl6 is above most mainstream languages conceptually, people aren't ready to use it IMO
- b2gills 7y ago
  For some benchmarks Perl6 is faster than Perl5. One person posted to #perl6 on freenode.net code written in both Perl6 and C/C++. They reported that the Perl6 code was faster. (I'm sure that the difference is mainly because the C/C++ code had to copy strings around, and iterate over them to locate the null terminators.) Unless you are doing something where you might consider writing parts of it in assembly, Perl6 may be fast enough already. (I wouldn't write a first person shooter in it yet.) There are some parts of it that are still in need of optimization. (If you find something that is egregiously slow, file a bug report.)
  - SwellJoe 7y ago
    Startup time is still egregiously slow compared to Perl 5. But, that couldn't be a major determining factor for people working in languages that are also slow to start (of which there are many, probably one could say most are slower than Perl 5). And, it's not a major concern for long-running applications and services, but for one-liners it feel sluggish.
    - lizmat 7y ago
      If you realize that Perl 6 basically has Moose in its core, and you compare startup time of Perl 5 with Moose with Perl 6, then it's not that bad at all: $ time perl6 -e '' real 0m0.120s $ time perl -MMoose -e '' real 0m0.131s And that's without all of the fancy type checking stuff of several Moose plugins that comes standard with Perl 6. So in that sense, if you are interested in Moose functionality, you're better of in Perl 6.

lloeki 7y ago

Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst. There's also Plack/PSGI, a Rack/WSGI equivalent, making new frameworks able to pop in more easily.

tadzik_ 7y ago
Those are all Perl 5 techs though – somewhat usable (or partially reimplemented) in Perl 6, but having written both for a living the Perl 6 ones are still way, way behind.
- lloeki 7y ago
  I do agree that Perl 6 could use some framework. But then Go did not need one to take off so I'm definitely not convinced it would help. Perl 6 is an entirely different language though - IMHO a mistake to call it Perl at all, it's just so confusing outside of the community, but the damage is done with no obvious way to fix that, making people think it's kind of a Python 2 to Python 3 breaking change - so it's like saying Crystal does not run Rails. One has to think of it as 'Perl6', not 'Perl v6.0'. Perl (the language whose current version is 5.22) is very much alive and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, regardless of progress of 'Rakudo Perl 6'. https://perl6.party/post/The-Hot-New-Language-Named-Rakudo https://perl6.party/post/The-Hot-New-Language-Named-Rakudo
  - vorg 7y ago
    > using all-lowercase letters for the compiler and title case for the language 'rakudo' is an implementation of 'Rakudo', huh? It's only natural for one to tag the specification and an implemention of it with different nouns in one's mind, even when there's only one implementation. I tend to think of 'go' being the reference implementation of the language called 'Golang', although its Google backers don't differentiate their official names.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      > 'rakudo' is an implementation of 'Rakudo', huh? It's only natural for one to tag the specification and an implemention of it with different nouns in one's mind I get your point theoretically, yet this is not without significant previous occurences: from the top of my head 'Java', 'Ruby', 'Python', 'Go', 'Lua' the languages have 'java', 'ruby', 'python', 'go', 'lua' as the official implementations†. Alternative names for the implementations are merely informal. People even still call the official Ruby implementation 'MRI' when it's not that anymore ever since 1.9 (It's actually YARV or KRI). TBH 'Golang' is more of a search engine hack. Regarding Perl 6 they could have done so too, but they locked in on theory and wanted to leverage Perl's heritage, which backfired hard. IMHO had they done some initial announcement like "Meet Rakudo, Perls' heir", they would have achieved the same goal with none of the drawbacks. Now the community web has built itself around the Perl 6 name so it's too late. † I'm perfectly aware that there are significant other examples though, like Common Lisp, Haskell, C, C++ that make that distinction. But then again, many of those implementations turn out to have specifics implemented that turns the actual implementation into a slight to extensive variant of the language, which turns into its own bag of hurts. Naming things definitely is Hard.

jlv2 7y ago

Perl 6 has been coming for almost 2 decades. Whole other language ecosystems have risen and fallen in that time.