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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

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.
- microtherion 7y ago
  > From the kind of community and values that Perl advocates has always had, arguably Perl 6 is a natural evolution from Perl 5. I think it's fair to say that Perl 6 represents the values of some very prominent Perl advocates, but not necessarily all of the community. Perl 5 was (is) both a rather eclectic and an eminently practical language. In my view, Perl 6 doubled down on the eclecticism when many users had expected it to double down on the practicality.
  - raiph 7y ago
    > In my view, Perl 6 doubled down on the eclecticism when many users had expected it to double down on the practicality. Is your view of its practicality based on using it heavily or have you mostly or completely left it alone because it's too slow or seems too eclectic or some other reason?
    - jhanschoo 7y ago
      From the linked article, Perl 6 tries to support all kinds of paradigms. This really detracts from professional development where communicating code and clear code is necessary. Every language that supports too many paradigms or gives too much expressive power to the user eventually has a "the good parts" books that proscribes a conventional way to program in that language in a professional setting.
      - b2gills 7y ago
        Perl 6 supports all kinds of paradigms, this makes it so that you don't have to write parts of the code in different languages and try to cobble them together. So the code can be written using the clearest paradigm for the task at hand without switching languages. --- The only real bad parts of Perl6 that I can see, is the parts that are copied from elsewhere largely unmodified. The C-style `for` loop is one such example. loop ( my int $a = 0 ; $a < 10 ; ++$a ) { print("hi\n"); } Why would anyone write that when they could write this instead: print("hi\n") xx 10; Where there isn't a chance for an off-by-one error, or accidently creating an infinite loop. You can still use it to intentionally create an infinite loop: my @a = rand xx ∞; # a lazy infinite array of random floating point numbers. --- After someone would write a “the good parts” book, the next major version of the language would probably fix many if not all of the not-so-good parts. If there is a feature that isn't one of “the good parts”, we'll just change it until it is. That's one of the great features of being an easily mutable language, you can mutate it into a better language. (It already has mutated in some small ways.) --- Perl6 doesn't have too many paradigms, if anything it has too few. I would love if it had support for implicit auto currying like Haskell does. (Instead I have to settle for explicit currying.)

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.

microtherion 7y ago
> From the kind of community and values that Perl advocates has always had, arguably Perl 6 is a natural evolution from Perl 5. I think it's fair to say that Perl 6 represents the values of some very prominent Perl advocates, but not necessarily all of the community. Perl 5 was (is) both a rather eclectic and an eminently practical language. In my view, Perl 6 doubled down on the eclecticism when many users had expected it to double down on the practicality.
- raiph 7y ago
  > In my view, Perl 6 doubled down on the eclecticism when many users had expected it to double down on the practicality. Is your view of its practicality based on using it heavily or have you mostly or completely left it alone because it's too slow or seems too eclectic or some other reason?
  - jhanschoo 7y ago
    From the linked article, Perl 6 tries to support all kinds of paradigms. This really detracts from professional development where communicating code and clear code is necessary. Every language that supports too many paradigms or gives too much expressive power to the user eventually has a "the good parts" books that proscribes a conventional way to program in that language in a professional setting.
    - b2gills 7y ago
      Perl 6 supports all kinds of paradigms, this makes it so that you don't have to write parts of the code in different languages and try to cobble them together. So the code can be written using the clearest paradigm for the task at hand without switching languages. --- The only real bad parts of Perl6 that I can see, is the parts that are copied from elsewhere largely unmodified. The C-style `for` loop is one such example. loop ( my int $a = 0 ; $a < 10 ; ++$a ) { print("hi\n"); } Why would anyone write that when they could write this instead: print("hi\n") xx 10; Where there isn't a chance for an off-by-one error, or accidently creating an infinite loop. You can still use it to intentionally create an infinite loop: my @a = rand xx ∞; # a lazy infinite array of random floating point numbers. --- After someone would write a “the good parts” book, the next major version of the language would probably fix many if not all of the not-so-good parts. If there is a feature that isn't one of “the good parts”, we'll just change it until it is. That's one of the great features of being an easily mutable language, you can mutate it into a better language. (It already has mutated in some small ways.) --- Perl6 doesn't have too many paradigms, if anything it has too few. I would love if it had support for implicit auto currying like Haskell does. (Instead I have to settle for explicit currying.)