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Myths about Perl 6

• tomalpha 7y ago
  I’m an old Perl 5 dev. I haven’t touched it in years apart from the occasional mega-one-liner (that I find strangely satisfying). I’d lost touch with Perl 6’s progress way back when. This was an interesting read for me just finding out how far it’s gotten. I don’t know if I’ll end up using it, but I’ll definitely take another look.
  • tyingq 7y ago
    Same, and that's why this one isn't a myth: "Myth: Perl 6 has no target demographic..." The easiest target demographic was active Perl5 users. We mostly all moved on to some other language after waiting a reasonable amount of time.
  • totalperspectiv 7y ago
    At this point, I'm more excited about the direction and changes in Perl5. It's been steadily chugging away through all the drama and keeps getting better. The following talk covers most of those improvements, as well as some of the new direction: https://youtu.be/4wKyNYs7eZw https://youtu.be/4wKyNYs7eZw
• gtirloni 7y ago
  > If you don’t know Perl 6, it will fly right over your head. It is so dense with information that skipping a single symbol might drastically change your interpretation of the entire bit of code How that isn't a problem for the author is beyond me. Different target audiences I guess (but another point in the article is that there isn't a target audience, other than existing Perl 5 users, which is pretty vague). I like to think I'm pretty open-minded to language's choices and I sure have my own preferences but this article didn't do much to change my image that Perl 6 isn't going to be even mildly adopted. I liked that it explained the Rakudo Star, zef and other things about the Perl 6 infrastructure though.
  • jannotti 7y ago
    Yup. This is not how you bust "myths".
  • angrygoat 7y ago
    This stuck out for me too. Sheer information density per character isn't something I value in a programming language. Being able to be clear and concise is certainly desirable. But that's not in any way the same thing; orthogonal high level concepts (iterators jump to mind) are great ways to hide complexity while keeping code clear, but ten characters of line noise where every symbol has some subtle meaning will turn into a nightmare when you've got five hundred lines of noise to make sense out of. I'm not a huge fan of Go, but as a counter-example to what's in this post, you can really see the virtues of the keep-it-simple approach the Go language designers have taken.
    • zzzcpan 7y ago
      Go relies on naming for everything, which pushes information density into naming where every symbol could have special meaning and special behavior too [1], but not consistent, universal or shaped and enforced by the compiler. It means more code to understand and write while less language syntax to learn. Other approach is to have more syntax, which can be more consistent, universal, flexible and therefore require less code to understand and write. Information density doesn't really change it's just syntax is more useful in more cases so it can replace a lot more specially crafted library functions. [1] https://golang.org/pkg/regexp/ https://golang.org/pkg/regexp/
      • nrdvana 7y ago
        I hadn't thought about it that way before, but I like and agree with this analysis. While method names can contain all the information, it requires more words and you end up with a Java-style mess thatContainsTheWholeAlgorithmInTheName. The punctuation is almost like having a bunch of one-cahracter standard names that everyone understands without having to agree on standard conventions.
    • tluyben2 7y ago
• audiometry 7y ago
  Paraphrasing: Myth 1 “Perl is not finished”. Why is it a myth? Because a language spec is complete, there just aren’t any compilers for the full spec. “ Come on.... A few myths down it becomes even more confusing when it talks about subsets of Perl and compilers for those subsets. I thought for a moment maybe this is satirical but I think the defenses were honestly given. Anyway I am not involved in Perl and not attacking it. If it works for you, then great.
  • jannotti 7y ago
    Exactly! After the first two "myths" I truly thought I was being trolled by some well-crafted geek satire.
    • dkarl 7y ago
      My money is on satire. > Modern English came to be as a solution to the fact that Old and Middle English weren’t very good languages – or, at the very least, they didn’t represent their usages any longer. It's either satire or mental illness.
      • KirinDave 7y ago
        This comment is not okay, by the rules of the site here or the basic tenants of civility.
        • dkarl 7y ago
          You couldn't include the community standards of HN. We often speculatively diagnose mental illness based on disorganized reasoning and bizarre arguments. See for example the recent submission of a mathematics site where a fair portion of the discussion was about whether the author might suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. I don't know why we feel fine publicly speculating about the mental health of people who seem to be clearly suffering in some way, but in a case where the odds are in favor of intentional trolling the topic becomes taboo.
• jannotti 7y ago
  Oh man. I don't know what to say. In the process of trying to bust myths, this confirmed every practical concern that the "myths" actually express. Perhaps the worst was: "Myth: Perl 6 will never be finished" The author of this actually tried to argue against that "myth" by saying, "Perl 6 is defined as a set of test cases." and goes on to say that since the tests were written long ago Perl 6 is done, and has been since like, forever. If that's the level of "Well, actually..." that this community uses, you can see why they've become irrelevant. I LOVED Perl.
  • wolfgke 7y ago
    > Oh man. I don't know what to say. In the process of trying to bust myths, this confirmed every practical concern that the "myths" actually express. I think this is part of the joke.
    • moomin 7y ago
      My favourite was “Myth: Perl6 is slow” “Reality: Look at all these open performance tickets!”
      • b2gills 7y ago
        Many of those are because one way to write the code is slower than another way to write it. So it is more about the speed not being evenly distributed.
    • Daemon404 7y ago
      Based on the rest of the blog, I can't actually tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not...
      • geofft 7y ago
        It's very poorly written satire if so. You can't point out the absurdity of something by repeatedly arguing that it's not absurd. The point about Chinese characters being unfamiliar to readers of Latin alphabets is a good one, for instance. It would be like Dilbert having a week where the pointy-haired boss's apparent nonsense is actually good management practice that Dilbert has been misunderstanding: it would neither be funny nor effectively educational.
• harry8 7y ago
  I'm unclear from this whether perl 6 is finished and usable. The argument that the language is finished but the compilers may not be seems odd. Is the "main" perl 6 compiler finished? With a language like perl be it 5 or 6 or python 2 or 3 people will conflate the language with the implementation because the assumption will be there will be one leading implementation and other niche implementations of interest to specialists. Saying perl 6 is not finished (is it?) means it is lacking somehow in its design and/or primary implementation. So is it? This sort of looks like a language standardisation committee argument tactic. We're not responsible for each C compiler, it should be clear which are standards compliant. Larry used to say he'd be standardised before perl would be.
  • sverige 7y ago
    There has been considerable discussion in the Perl 6 community that they should have named it something else besides "Perl," like maybe "Rakudo." In many ways, it's not really a descendant of Perl 5 and prior versions. It's really an entirely different language. I wish they'd stop calling it Perl already. Perl 5 is still actively maintained and developed.
  • cygx 7y ago
    Perl6 has had two proper language releases (v6.c in Dec 2015 and v6.d in Nov 2018), and there's a compiler that implements them (namely Rakudo). The language is not 'finished' insofar that parts of the original design have yet to be realized (eg macros), and as any language that isn't dead, it continues to evolve to meet developers' needs.
• nxrabl 7y ago
  I respect that Rakudo is still under development, but it's no myth that, as it is today, Perl 6 is pretty slow. I did some benchmarking [0] comparing the time for various interpreted languages to start up, print "Hello world", and quit (or to start up, read from /dev/null, and quit), and Rakudo was about twice as slow as Node and Ruby, and 100x slower than Perl 5. (I think this is a decent test of performance if what you mostly run are short scripts but I'm more than open to improvements.) [0] https://github.com/wilt00/startuptime/blob/master/analysis.ipynb https://github.com/wilt00/startuptime/blob/master/analysis.i...
  • Ultimatt 7y ago
    $ time perl -E 'say "hello world"' hello world real 0m0.016s user 0m0.005s sys 0m0.007s $ time perl6 -e 'say "hello world"' hello world real 0m0.187s user 0m0.226s sys 0m0.032s That is not 100x slower, 10x sure. But once its running its faster than Perl 5 in plenty of situations especially for things like heavy OO use or compact numeric work in tight loops. Anyone who argues Perl 6 is fast is definitely being disingenuous but the counter is almost certainly more annoying to come across simply because "startup time" is only important if you expect your program to execute in less than a tenth of a second. So tight loops in a shell script for something simple, stick to Perl 5. Large web app that will be running for the next 5 years who cares about 10x slower startup time? Hardly a benchmark thats useful.
    • futureastronaut 7y ago
      Agreed, "Perl 6 is slow" is a ridiculous takeaway from a benchmark of process start times.
      • lizmat 7y ago
        Especially if you would compare a "Modern Perl 5" startup sequence, which would involve using the `Moose` module (as Perl 6 has that built in). Then startup times are basically the same.
        • 7y ago
• gravitas 7y ago
  > Myth: Perl 6 is hard to read. [[&g]] (1..100)».&f ...OK. > Myth: Perl 6 is too complicated and too hard to learn. C Chaining infix != ≠ == < <= ≤ > >= ≥ eq ne lt le gt ge ~~ === eqv !eqv =~= ≅ (elem) (cont) (<) (>) (<=) (>=) (<+) (>+) ∈ ∉ ∋ ∌ ⊂ ⊄ ⊃ ⊅ ⊆ ⊈ ⊇ ⊉ ≼ ≽ ...OK.
  • benj111 7y ago
    "[[&g]] (1..100)».&f" In all fairness you can construct an obtuse example for any programming language.
    • tyingq 7y ago
      It's verbatim from the blog post. To be fair, the author is trying to make the point you're making.
      • raiph 7y ago
        The OP is making the point that A) it's extremely easy to read if you know the language and B) it's extremely easy to learn the language and C) it's extremely easy to think something is hard to read just because you don't know the language. Some hints: sub add ($left, $right) { $left + $right } add 1,2 # call function add as listop; yields 3 1 [&add] 2 # use function add as infix; yields 3 [+] 1,2,3 # sticks + between numbers; yields 6 [[&add]] 1,2,3 # sticks add between numbers; yields 6 1..100 # numeric range between 1 and 100 (1..100) # so postfix applies to range, not 100 » # parallelizable map passing values 1..100 . # call a method as the mapped function &f # function f gets called 100 times with # its first arg values 1..100
    • cygx 7y ago
      For the record, this could also be written as (1..100).hyper.map(&f).reduce(&g) Syntactic sugar can make a mess when overused, but also improve readabiliy tremendously when used judiciously.
  • KirinDave 7y ago
• mberning 7y ago
  “Myth: Perl 6 has a bizarre ecosystem.” Based on the explanation provided I would have to say “myth confirmed”. It’s not exactly straightforward.
• hvs 7y ago
  Myth: Perl 6 has a bizarre ecosystem. And then goes on to explain that it has a bizarre ecosystem.
  • Redoubts 7y ago
    I thought that part was a little overwrought. an equivalent system would be pointing to PyPy with RPython. I don’t think that ecosystem is terribly bizarre.
• strictfp 7y ago
  TIL that Perl 6 is an APL wannabe
• jpswade 7y ago
  I actually really enjoyed Perl. It forced me to learn regex properly and I learned about parsing mail, amongst other things. These days, I just don't see a reason to pick Perl over any other language. Stuff like this doesn't help, I read "Perl 6 has a bizarre ecosystem", now I'm under the impression that it's not just bizarre, it's also confusing. Perl was great because it was simple, easy to get started, great community and modules, and was ubiquitous.
  • tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Careful with Perl-style regexpes (aptly renamed to "Patterns" in Perl 6 AFAICT) being proper. They have higher complexity than standard regexpes [1], and have been conjectured to recognize (a larger fragment of) context-free languages [2] rather than just regular languages. [1]: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html [2]: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=406253 https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=406253
    • gbacon 7y ago
      Perl Regular Expression Matching is NP-Hard https://perl.plover.com/NPC/ https://perl.plover.com/NPC/
• baxtr 7y ago
  I first learnt Basic and Pascal. When I started Perl it felt like pure magic
• dmitriid 7y ago
  As I grow older, I end up preferring “boring” languages. They have predictability, discoverability, learnability. And all within the limits of a person’s life. A code by programmer A that does X is not significantly different than code that does the same X by programmer B. Even if that programmer is myself 6 months or 10 years apart. An algorithm X will loom like X in the standard library, in a third-party library, or in a random snippet from stack overflow. A mismatched or ommitted character willnot (usually) alter the bahaviour of a program in orthogonal ways. You will not need a magnifying glass to read a mish-mash of ASCII math symbols to figure out whether someone built a death ray, or just a milk shaker.
  • lizmat 7y ago
    > A mismatched or ommitted character will not (usually) alter the bahaviour of a program in orthogonal ways. Are you implying that Perl 6 is the only language in which adding / removing a `!` or a `not` does not alter the behaviour of a program in orthogonal ways???
    • dmitriid 7y ago
      I'm not implying anything. I'm directly referring to points made in the post (emphasis mine): --- start quote --- It is so dense with information that skipping a single symbol might drastically change your interpretation of the entire bit of code. Want to see how dense Perl 6 can be? [[&g]] (1..100)».&f Every single symbol in that line of code carries a significance, and the code would be drastically different should any of the symbols be missing or different. --- end quote --- Couple that with an insane amount of operators and the "there's more than one way to do it" philosophy, and you'll see what I'm against.
      • cygx 7y ago
        You hear such complaints a lot, but frankly, this has never been an issue for me in practice.
  • KirinDave 7y ago
    > A code by programmer A that does X is not significantly different than code that does the same X by programmer B. Even if that programmer is myself 6 months or 10 years apart. Honestly, this reads more like you're burnt out and would prefer not to have to keep apace of new developments to continue contributing. I can deeply appreciate that condition, but it seems to me to be an unhealthy place to be on many levels. For one, natural language is constantly evolving. Shouldn't the languages we use to describe the solutions to problems be similarly capable if they want to keep up with a rapidly changing world? For two, we can look at what extreme conservatism in this department does to you. Python 2 has supposed to have started being deprecated, but we're getting hints that big companies are more inclined to just take over support of Python 2 rather than move forward to Python 3. This problem is the result of the culture of "a 10 year old line of code being equally useful without other version controls in place." Similarly, we see a lot of languages punt on actually making it easy to prototype and deploy modern data structures and algorithms. That's why a bunch of mainstream languages still have very slow sorting algorithms in the stdlib (e.g., O(n²) quicksort instead of O(n) american flag sort; still using amortized resizing hash tables as opposed to HAMTs, etc); it's just crazy hard to actually write that code reliably. > You will not need a magnifying glass to read a mish-mash of ASCII math symbols to figure out whether someone built a death ray, or just a milk shaker. No one actually has this problem. Not Perl 6, not Perl 5, and not Haskell or Ocaml. Maybe APL had that problem, but it's long gone. Holding these rhetorical points out seriously seems to me to be more evasive than realistic.
• smt88 7y ago
  I think (hope?) Poe's law[1] has bitten this comment section. Some of the points, where the author's busting of the myth seems to be the opposite, sound very tongue-in-cheek. Then again, later in the article, it sounds sincere and defensive. This is a good example of why using the right tone can be as important as using the right words... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
• Isamu 7y ago
  I always enjoyed Perl 5 and still do. Never got the point of 6, always seemed unnecessary and still does. 5 is very pleasant for your own scripting and most heavy lifting tasks, nothing else has ever been quite as quick and fun. Maybe not a great choice for a company-wide tooling language, because it is too easy to write in a way that others find offensive, or else draconian standards are enforced that turn it into another language, and at that point why not just use Python?
• foxes 7y ago
  >Alternative reality: You cannot read a language which you do not know. I think this is probably the only thing I agree with. >Language is inconsistent. Programming languages shouldn't be inconsistent. They should conform to a formal specification that you can use to reason about correctness. A bunch of test cases seems like a bit of a cop out. It would be nicer if it was a proof rather than just a test. >Reality is inconsistent. I certainly hope reality is not inconsistent otherwise I might wake up as a potato tomorrow.
  • b2gills 7y ago
    In reality Perl6 is strangely consistent.
• the_duke 7y ago
  This almost seems like satire, but not quite. But then again it really does. > Perl 6’s lack of a niche is the language’s niche. > Perl 6’s compilers may not implement the language in its entirety yet, but that does not mean the language is incomplete. > Language is inconsistent. Ideas are inconsistent. Reality is inconsistent. > It is so dense with information that skipping a single symbol might drastically change your interpretation of the entire bit of code. > That’s why Perl 6 is introduced slowly and softly – using a little subset that the community likes to call “baby Perl 6” > The priority was never speed, it was all-encompassing expressivity. Also, a page by the same author [1], with a comic awarding Perl 6 with "worlds worst ML, worst Python, worst C and worst Smalltalk". --- I would personally assume that the goal here is to provide a humorous and intentionally a self-ironic explanation. The message seems to be something like "Perl 6 has many flaws. There is a reason for them though, and I still like it." [1] https://aearnus.github.io/2019/04/05/perl6-is-the-world-s-worst-ml https://aearnus.github.io/2019/04/05/perl6-is-the-world-s-wo...
  • jhanschoo 7y ago
    > Hopefully though this post will convince you to drop that veil of hatred and see the intentions behind these design decisions. I suppose that the article honestly achieved what it said it set out to do. It's just that those design decisions are more like what one expected from (an albeit well-thought-out) toy or hobby language rather than a next iteration of one of the most ubiquitous languages during its heyday. That's where most of the hate and disappointment comes from, the mismatch of expectations. I suppose that the article and that previous linked page were written deliberately to both seem like a satire to the extent that you viewed it as a mainstream scripting language, and an useful overview of Perl 6 to the extent that you are willing to let it be a toy language or an experiment. From the kind of community and values that Perl advocates has always had, arguably Perl 6 is a natural evolution from Perl 5. But earlier versions of Perl were the right language in the right place when the hashes-and-arrays dynamic interpretable languages started to gain traction over the heavyweight OOP C-style languages for tasks (web servers, etc.) that would increasingly becoming more heavyweight, so there was this expectation that Perl would evolve to serve this community's needs when it didn't, leading to the mismatch of expectations.
• ricardobeat 7y ago
  > Myth: Perl 6 has a bizarre ecosystem proceeds to describe a bizarre ecosystem Jokes aside, I am particularly put off by the attitude alone, which already exists in the Perl 5 community: if you are not an expert in X, you have no standing to criticize it - why you would be interested in becoming an expert in something you don’t appreciate is beyond me.
• jon_kuperman 7y ago
  Is this satire?
• geofft 7y ago
  It makes perfect sense to say that the target demographic of English is English speakers—or more precisely, the target demographic of Modern English is Middle English speakers who wanted a few simpler rules, some continental vocabulary, following other contemporaneous European languages in not having þ and distinguishing i and j, etc. It was a relatively small change and very intentionally served a community of people who already spoke Middle English well. It was the Python 2-to-3 of English. The target demographic of Esperanto, meanwhile, was the whole world: people who already had a language, people who already had a workable lingua franca in international contexts (French, later English), and in particular people who weren't familiar with the European language patterns that Esperanto was largely based on. So it had limited success. A Japanese or Indonesian or Persian or Swahili diplomat not familiar with any European language would be better served learning French or English than Esperanto, because those languages are roughly equally foreign, there are many more resources for learning French or English, there is a larger community and more people to speak to, there is a larger corpus of works, etc. And an Anglophone or Francophone diplomat has very little incentive to learn Esperanto, either. Modern Hebrew, on the other hand, had a well-identified target demographic: Jews from around the world migrating to the reestablished state of Israel who lacked a shared everyday language. Some liturgical Hebrew was already familiar to most of this population, and there was a strong cultural willingness to see a reestablished Hebrew language. So while it is in many senses a conlang, it was far more successful than Esperanto and now has a large community of native speakers. So the question of whether a programming language—especially one that is so much like a conlang, not an incremental evolution based on use in practice (like the C standards committee accepting compiler-specific dialectal changes)—has a target demographic is a fair one.
• tanilama 7y ago
  I don't buy the major argument a language is completely separate entity with its implementation, especially there is only very limited choices of implementations out there. Other arguments feel a little too convievent to dismiss the concerns as non-issues. The author is basically saying the language can look like anything and it doesn't need to be performant, which is a pretty opinionated and not a good look for selling. In fact we are in a programming reality that is overwhelmed with choices of languages, only expressiveness isn't enough to have people onboard.
  • ccashell 7y ago
    For many languages, the implementation and spec are completely separate entities. Many of the biggest ones, actually: - C - C++ - Java - JavaScript
• xvilka 7y ago
  Perl 6 is a mistake, the same efforts should have been put to improve the Perl 5 evolutionary. See also the Future of Perl 5[1] discussion. [1] https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1220917 https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1220917
  • Ultimatt 7y ago
    You mean like cperl which already exists but was totally shunned by the Perl 5 community? http://perl11.org/cperl/ http://perl11.org/cperl/
    • ether_at_cpan 7y ago
      That had far more to do with reactions to the person behind cperl, than cperl itself.
• dkarl 7y ago
  You can try as hard as you can to shift complexity away from new programmers, but it’s impossible to stop them from seeking it out. If you show a new Perl 6 programmer this page, they will run away screaming in the other direction. That’s why Perl 6 is introduced slowly and softly This is so out of touch with current fashion, when "once I worked with a guy who wrote a bunch of code nobody could understand" is an accepted argument against a language. Fashion has cycles, and someday people will come back around to the idea that every language requires taste and restraint, and dull tools present a different kind of danger than sharp ones. Maybe the plan is that Perl 6 will still be waiting in the wings when that day comes.
• carlsborg 7y ago
  What are the arguments for building the devops part of your system with Perl 6? Stackoverflow developer survey 2018 lists Perl at 4.2% for “most commonly used programming language” which surprising to me was close to Scala at 4.6% of respondents (if I interpreted that correctly) so clearly a lot of people are still using it.
  • cygx 7y ago
    Those are probably mostly Perl5 people, though.
• ben509 7y ago
  Thinking about the point of Perl6... I was trying to work out how to best structure a website to explain a language, so I did a quick survey of existing sites. It's very interesting what different languages choose to put on that first screen you see. Many of them have a tagline. "Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively." or "Welcome to the Swift community. Together we are working to build a programming language to empower everyone to turn their ideas into apps on any platform." or "Ruby is... A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write." Perl6.org has this opening pitch: "Hi, my name is Camelia. I'm the spokesbug for Perl 6, the plucky little sister of Perl 5. Like her world-famous big sister, Perl 6 intends to carry forward the high ideals of the Perl community. Perl 6 is currently being developed by a team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers. You can help too. The only requirement is that you know how to be nice to all kinds of people (and butterflies). Go to #perl6 (irc.freenode.net) and someone will be glad to help you get started." It's focused on idealism and community; whereas other language sites are focused pretty strictly on making a case to users, Perl6 is presented as a fun hobby where you can meet nice people. It strikes me as a bit of a call back to the early days of computing when it was more oriented towards the hobbyist than industry. If you accept the premise that the language exists primarily for people to have fun using the language, many of the design decisions make a lot more sense. Given that Perl5 has largely been supplanted by Python and Ruby, trying to fill that niche is a bit redundant. While other languages are making deliberate decisions to make sure a person trying to use their language can get work done, if someone has to go to a Perl6 forum to ask questions and talk about it, that's not a problem, that's largely the point.
  • lizmat 7y ago
    Being a person who has been able to make a living doing fun things almost all of her life, I would argue that it is important for any programming language to be fun when you're working with it. If it not, it is just $work. I feel that if you do not have fun in what you do for a living, you cannot be creative in what you do. And if you as a programmer can not be creative in what you create, you're just a commodity soon to be replaced by a small AI.
• eitland 7y ago
  Found this link in there and it looks interesting: https://perl6intro.com/ https://perl6intro.com/
• kinkora 7y ago
  Myth: Perl 6 has no official "framework" Reality: Yep. The biggest issue with Perl 6 IMO is that there are no "official" scaff holding framework(s) for anything. If I need to spin up a web app? Start from scratch. Need something like a CMS? Start from scratch. Need a static site generator? Start from scratch. Yes, I know there are probably some Github repos out there that may do what I want and I am nitpicking but it is IMHO that until a programming language adopts an official framework[1] to help with new entrants or even crusty old dev guys like me that don't wanna keep reinventing the wheel, that language will rarely ever get popular. [1] e.g. rails to ruby, laravel/wordpress to PHP, Django to python, nodejs to javascript, etc
  • thefounder 7y ago
    Ho doesn't have a framework either but it's quite easy to start a webserver/develop a web app.
  • hpcjoe 7y ago
    2 minutes of searching found a number[1] of modules implementing frameworks. Notice the static site generator you mentioned to be one of the lacking elements[2]. Or the CMS system[3]. But sure, lets just dismiss these, and accept the "but its not rails/django/...". The comment reads just like the anti-Perl language hate that it is. I'm curious though ... WP has been developed over multiple decades, Django started out a long time ago. Perl6 has been available in usable form for what ... 3 years? And you are seriously asking why the ecosystem is not equivalent? [1] https://modules.perl6.org/t/WEB https://modules.perl6.org/t/WEB [2] https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Uzu:cpan:SACOMO https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Uzu:cpan:SACOMO [3] https://perl6.pheix.org/ https://perl6.pheix.org/
    • kinkora 7y ago
      Perhaps I could have better communicated my feedback and I do apologise for that but I wanted to point out that I did not say there is nothing out there and in fact, specifically mentioned that I could find those repos: > Yes, I know there are probably some Github repos out there that may do what I want and I am nitpicking Plus I could also say that if you spent 2 minutes searching my comment history, you will find that I am a Perl enthusiast and also started my sys admin career with cgi-bin yet you jumped straight into dismissing me as an anti-Perl person. I could also add that if you took another 2 minutes to look at the link of list of modules that you listed, none of them are friendly to new adopters. E.g. Here are the documentation for the top 4 links: • Bailador: https://github.com/Bailador/Ressources https://github.com/Bailador/Ressources (misspelled link + 404 error to documentation) • Cro: https://cro.services/docs/intro/getstarted https://cro.services/docs/intro/getstarted (taking out the code samples, the whole documentation is 9 lines) • Uzu: https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Uzu:cpan:SACOMO https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Uzu:cpan:SACOMO (this one is actually good. just needs some polishing for new comers) • Pheix: https://perl6.pheix.org/doc https://perl6.pheix.org/doc (404 error to documentation) And compare that to the following: • Rails: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html • Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/start/ https://www.djangoproject.com/start/ • Laravel: https://laravel.com/docs/5.8 https://laravel.com/docs/5.8 That's just the documentation. I haven't even gone on about the fact that all of those Perl 6 modules are by independent contributors (Cro being a private web consulting company) and the worry about it disappearing or losing support for future releases, bug fixes, etc if I want to adopt Perl 6 for production systems. So my point stands.. until Perl 6 has an official & comprehensive framework to do something to help beginners, it will not be popular. Key word "official", "comprehensive" and "beginners". The whole point about this article is that people don't adopt Perl 6 because of the many myths purported but my feedback is that the reason because any new language gets popular is due to the official frameworks and community around it that helps the adoption which also set some standards and will help dispel some of these myths. All of these makes it much more inviting to someone new to the language and drives adoption. Without that, even me as a Perl veteran will find it tough to get myself up and running. Lastly, I have tried to give constructive feedback to the Perl 6 community and have always met with these sort of defensive behaviour. We could do with some more conversations around feedback than simply dismissing comments right away with a "your language is so filled with anti-perl hate".
• antonyme 7y ago
  People still use Perl?
• sashavingardt2 7y ago
  Ex-Perl 5 dev. Still use it once in a blue moon b/c of the regexes. Perl 6 was a joke even 15 years ago )
  • lizmat 7y ago
    A well informed opinion.
• cutler 7y ago
  I started with Perl5 around 2001 and loved it, especially its superb regex handling. I certainly don't "hate" Perl6 but I think a lot of excuses have been made over the years since its release for its terrible performance. Perl5 distinguished itself with superb regex performance yet Perl6 is still over 9 times slower than Perl5 (and 5 times slower than Ruby) in performing what Perl5 excelled at - parsing a web server's log file. Until Perl6's performance at least matches Ruby's for basic parsing (no, not grammars) it's not going to be taken seriously no matter how many other tricks it has up its sleeve.
  • raiph 7y ago
    > Perl6 is still over 9 times slower than Perl5 Any chance you can share what code, data, and compiler version you used to get those numbers? > Until Perl6's performance at least matches Ruby's for basic parsing (no, not grammars) it's not going to be taken seriously no matter how many other tricks it has up its sleeve. I agree it's still slow but question your prognosis. For example, I think devs who care about O(1) handling of graphemes will use it when it's fast enough for them. And its multi prompt continuation control flow/concurrency/parallel/async design is bearing fruit. But even if you're right, I see no reason not to think that P6 will keep getting faster and develop nicely throughout the 2020s.
    • cutler 7y ago
      Perl 5.26.3, Ruby 2.6.3, Rakudo Star 2019.03.1 all running on OS X 10.12.6 use v6; for 'logs1.txt'.IO.lines -> $line { say $line if $line ~~ m/<<\w ** 15>>/; }
      • raiph 7y ago
        Thanks! One fly in the ointment is that you didn't share anything about the data, especially its encoding and what sort of multilingual text it contained, nor the code for the other proglangs. One upshot is that I'm now wondering if you're comparing apples with oranges. P6 is optimized for Unicode, making handling of Unicode simple, with O(1) character (grapheme) indexing. For example, in P6 regex syntax, << and \w, which are related to the concept "word character", refer to graphemes ("what a user thinks of as a character") whose base codepoint has the "word" property. And \w 15 refers to 15 of these graphemes. In contrast \w in P5 regex syntax, by default, refers to a codepoint with the "word" property, not a grapheme. And I'm not sure what support Ruby has for graphemes. So I'm wondering if your log text was utf8, and if so, if you took the codepoint/grapheme distinction into account.
• Jach 7y ago
  The quoted bit at the end makes me a bit sad: > That’s why I devoted two decades of my life to helping ensure that Perl 6 lets you solve problems in whatever (reasonable) way that suits you…and suits your problem! By all means solve the majority of your problem functionally, but implement the inherently stateful parts of your program with objects, and handle the intrinsically linguistic components with declarative grammars. But do it all in the same language and at whatever granularity you are most comfortable with. Why? This could just as well describe Common Lisp. Sure depending on the exact expressiveness you want you'll have to bootstrap it with some paren-containing bits, but I suspect you wouldn't need 20 years to do it, and there's a lot there already... Perl 6 has long been my "desert island" language. That is, if I'm going to be stranded on a desert island with certain death in the near future, I'd get the most kicks in the time left out of discovering all of Perl 6's secrets and quirks. I don't think I'll ever use it seriously though... I would like if its built-in grammars system spread to other languages like PCREs did but that doesn't seem likely.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  As if Larry needed a justification on why making a language. Or anyone for that matter.
• butterisgood 7y ago
  Several times per year I find myself wanting to use Perl 6 for something. Then I feel like I should be using Rust or working on/with Zig.... help! It definitely looks interesting. I remember when the “best” Perl 6 was implemented in Haskell (https://github.com/perl6/Pugs.hs https://github.com/perl6/Pugs.hs)
• KirinDave 7y ago
  Honestly, I've considered getting back into Perl 6. Python is so wretchedly regressive and I'm just not a fan of the decisions made in Ruby (although I confess whenever I need to slice up a string or something in a way I don't immediately know in Bash it's a sbcl or irb shell I call out to). Perl 6's philosophy of redistributing complexity and providing more than one notation because different notations have different effective use cases has always deeply appealed to me. Not just because I think it's true (most folks think their language makes things simply only because a library writer has done a huge sum of work to make specialists feel awesome rather than actually face the reality of the library), but because I think that it leads to a more honest organizational approach to software by allowing different folks to focus on different areas within the same code-base and share the load more horizontally as opposed to hierarchically. On a more personal level, I really miss the days when I was excited about scripting languages. To some extent, I am less excited because languages like Haskell and Clojure have come into their own and are so expressive you often don't need a scripting language to make progress fast in domains they have good libraries for. But still, the days when I felt like scripting languages were trying to actually address the machine-cycle-human-effort tradeoff is past us. Ruby and Javascript have largely stopped innovating radically, with only incremental changes since 2012 that I see. Python will forever squat on its 2008-style mentality that all programming is terrible, and Lua is constrained by its design space to have an extremely minimalist feature set. Languages like Pike are largely gone, and it sorta feels like only a few Lisps like PLT Scheme have kept pushing forward on these ideas. I guess I'm also sad that other folks seem to have such radical double standards for Perl 6 in the comments here. The only way it seems it could succeed is if it was faster than Lua while being more featureful than Ruby while also being exactly as regressive as Python. But none of the languages mentioned here would actually meet any one of those criterion outside of itself (even if it were possible to mix them).
  • overgard 7y ago
    I don't see any double standards. Nobody saying it has to be ALL of things, but it needs to be at least some of those things. I've yet to hear a single compelling reason for why I should use Perl 6 over anything else. The blog post itself is saying "you don't need a why", which just seems untrue. It's not enough for Perl 6 to exist, for me to invest time I need to know what the point of that time investment is. Pretty much every popular language has some reason why you should use it: c -> it maps to the machine well perl5 -> C and Bash are bad at string processing python -> C is too hard to use for a lot of simple problems, perl is complicated Haskell -> Side effects cause too many problems javascript -> It runs in a web browser java -> C is a loaded footgun The languages that all become rarely visited niches all have one thing in common: they don't have a compelling use case. They always say "all use cases", but frankly, anything that tries to be everything to everyone almost always ends up not being particularly compelling to any one group.
• overgard 7y ago
  The reasoning on #1 is amusing. "It's finished because the test cases are finished". Can you imagine going to your boss and saying: Coder: "The program is finished" Boss: "Cool, when can I demo it?" Coder: "Well you can't actually run it, but all the test cases are finished, someone just needs to fill in an implementation" (And yes, I get that the implementation is usable. But if the language has been done "forever" and the implementation is still partial... maybe the language is a little too complicated?) Also the argument that it doesn't need a demographic holds no weight to me. Lets say I read through the Perl docs and go, holy crap, I totally want to use this at work. I still need to convince others. "We should use Perl 6 for our next project" "Why?" Reasons that might actually be convincing: we can hire for it, it's more productive/safe/faster than what we use, the tooling is great, Big Company X is behind it. Reasons I could use for Perl 6: It's uh, slow and the interpreter isn't really finished and the internet generally regards it as a joke, but, I can express ideas that usually require words with symbols instead.
  • Spivak 7y ago
    I mean it's not that absurd that Perl 6 the language the defined independently of any particular implementation of it. Perl 6 seems unique (in a good way) that the language isn't defined by "whatever the reference compiler does" but by "this known fixed suite of tests."
    • overgard 7y ago
      It's definitely not unique in that regard, C++ is the same way. The difference though is C++ is old and established. Perl 6 is relatively new, and it seems crazy to me to say it's "done" if the first iteration of the language spec hasn't even been fully implemented yet. Also when the C++ committee says something like "C++ 20 is done", that news is generally not super useful to me. It's something I tuck away as something I might use eventually. I'm way more interested in "Clang/VC++ is now C++20 compliant", because then I can actually use it.
      • raiph 7y ago
        In P6 culture, the word "spec" is considered an ambiguous word that can mean several very different things including: * Specification. The P6 language is specified by a test suite called Roast. There are "release" tags, for example 6.c, 6.c.errata, and 6.d. If a program passes the suite it's "officially" entitled to call itself a P6 compiler for the language versions it passes. * Speculation. Discussion, ideas, RFCs, a large range of design documents written in English that were once called "specification" documents but were never intended to be a substitute for the binary precision and decision of a test suite, multiple compiler prototypes, etc. Thus: > the first iteration of the language spec hasn't even been fully implemented yet. Rakudo fully implemented 6.c, the first iteration of the electronic language spec, 3 years ago. > I'm way more interested in "Clang/VC++ is now C++20 compliant", because then I can actually use it. Exactly. P6 has focused on having a digital specification. If someone wants to know if a compiler is compliant, they can run a test and know within minutes. If you prefer a specification written in natural language, and claims of compliance to be relative to that natural language specification, and consider tests secondary, well, all I can say is that the P6 view is the other way around. If your point is that a couple hundred thousand tests isn't enough, then yes, you have a very good point, one can never have too few tests, but one has to start somewhere. (There's also Toast, which is like Roast, but applied to the entire ecosystem, running compilers against the test suites of all publicly available modules. cf cpantesters.)
• ken 7y ago
  > So let me pose a rhetorical question: what is English’s target demographic? How do you even answer that? Is it tautological? I think it's a perfectly valid question, and my answer is: people who live in English-speaking regions. English has pushed beyond that into business and technology, but every natural language's first and primary demographic is the geographic or cultural region in which it's spoken. The main purpose of a spoken language is to be spoken, and people can't do that if they aren't around other people who speak it. > Modern English was constructed from Middle English with various features changed to more closely represent the format of colloquial speech. That's a misleading way to phrase it. "Constructed language" is a linguistic term, and English isn't one. All of this is neither here nor there because natural languages and programming languages are almost completely different beasts. I have still not seen any examples of where a fact or process or history in one could be used to draw any valid conclusions about the other. > To answer the question more directly: Perl 6’s lack of a niche is the language’s niche. That's a direct answer? I feel like this whole FAQ is just an exercise in twisting the meaning of words.
• purplezooey 7y ago
  The easy concurrency stuff is cool and very useful.
• idlewords 7y ago
  I was a huge fan of Perl from the early 2000's, in large part because the community around it was eclectic and helpful. Perl was ugly and useful and for a long time the easiest way to get things done if you were dealing with random stuff from the web. My business (Pinboard) runs on a perl5 backend. The over-decade-long transition to Perl 6 has not only alienated me from wanting to do more development in the language, but made me look like an idiot back in 2002 when I championed Perl 6 to my bosses as the wave of the future. In my opinion, getting rid of the main appeal of the language ("it just works") was a suicidal move. I admire and respect Larry Wall, but I am not going near this language again. At this point, it feels more like a religious cult than a tool to get things done.
  • xref 7y ago
    Why is it that Perl (apparently) didn’t survive the transition from 5->6, but after years of acrimony Python looks like it will survive the 2->3 transition?
    • cygx 7y ago
      Perl6 was a reaction to Perl5's loss of mindshare, but it took a very long time to arrive and still cannot be used as a drop-in replacement for the latter. It has rather different strengths and weaknesses and thus has to find a new niche to live in.
      • microtherion 7y ago
        > Perl6 was a reaction to Perl5's loss of mindshare That's not the way I remember it. The Perl 6 effort was announced in 2000, and (at least by the ever-fickle TIOBE index), Perl marketshare kept growing until 2003 and did not start declining until 2005: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/
        • raiph 7y ago
          The GP spoke of mindshare. Marketshare shifts frequently lag shifts in mindshare by years. Some Perl fora had started to become hostile by 1999. It had clearly begun to lose core talent and something needed to be done about that.
• dlandis 7y ago
  “Myth: Perl 6 has no target demographic and no niche. Reality: So what?” Wait, so it’s not a “myth” then, right? Or am I missing the joke?
• smsm42 7y ago
  I loved Perl in the 90s. A lot of my programming back then was done in Perl (Perl 4/5 of course), and it was good (well, as good as it could be back then :). But now, 20 years later, I am not sure I can name any reason I would start a new project in Perl, or try to scale a decidedly-not-flat learning curve of Perl 6. And looks like the article discussed pretty much recognizes that, though trying to cleverly dismiss it with koans like "Perl 6’s lack of a niche is the language’s niche". But somehow this does not seem to be very enlightening. There's always the classical "because it's there" reason, but is there any others to get into Perl 6 as it is now?
• mclehman 7y ago
  I don't necessarily want to wade into the discussion on the tone of the article, but I do want to detail something I've used Perl 6 for that makes me really enjoy working with the language. I've noticed a trend in threads where P6 comes up: I rarely see people actually point to specific instances where P6 features have been helpful. This lack of examples certainly doesn't help push back against the idea that the language isn't usable or, indeed, useful with anything less than 100% of the spec implemented. I use P6 for all of my small deployment scripts (as well as a number of small utilities I've written, like a tmux wrapper). It gets out of my way when I just need something quick and useful from the start. For example it's exceedingly easy to wrap other utilities because arguments to MAIN generate a command line interface automatically. It also provides features that help me as I move from a useful-but-dirty prototype to a more maintainable script or piece of a more complex system. Gradual typing is a big part of this. I tend not to add types for most things, but it's very easy to use the P6 type system to watch my back when I do want that help. It's not as good at catching things before runtime as a hardcore static type system, but it manages to warn me "... will never succeed with declared signature ..." often enough. I have a no-frills, no-auth file sharing site I deploy periodically to get a web front-end to share things with people (usually already on a VPN, sometimes just on a LAN). At the moment, I use a simple deploy script to do this manually, but I'm considering setting something up to automatically deploy it when connecting to a particular network. I almost definitely won't get that part right on the first try and would really rather not end up accidentally deploying a no-auth filesystem on my server's public IP address. Using the P6 type system, I can easily define a subset of IPv4 addresses: my @private-ranges = <10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16>; subset IPv4::Private of IPv4 where -> $ip { Net::Netmask.new(any @private-ranges).match($ip) }; Then simply defining MAIN with a typed (and named, in this case, hence the colon) argument will handle all the checking at the type level. sub MAIN(IPv4::Private :$ip) { ... } Now I won't be able to deploy this service on a public IP as long as I use this deploy script as a primitive in whatever eventual solution I end up with, and the automatically generated usage message even helps communicate why a call failed (provided you have descriptive type/parameter names). λ | ./deploy --ip=$(dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com) Usage: ./deploy.p6 [--ip=<Private>] λ | ./deploy --ip=10.0.0.2 Deploy successful.
  • 7y ago
• foobar_ 7y ago
  ES6 is an acceptable perl. 1. It has peg grammar 2. Reasonably Unicode friendly 3. Transpilers did what Parrot VM was supposed to do 4. OOP is flexible enough 5. Optional type checking and FP libraries 6. No macros and neither does Perl 6
  • b2gills 7y ago
    Rakudo does have macros. They weren't good enough to be enshrined in the Perl6 language itself. So there is a project named 007 for exploring how macros should work in Perl6.
• amptorn 7y ago
  If Perl 6, by this essay's own admission, has no target demographic and no niche, then who is this essay even aimed at? Who are we attempting to convince?
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  Bad programs can and are are written using any programming language.