4 ms·
This looks surprisingly neat, honestly. I've never used Perl, let alone Perl 6, but I think I see why people cared about it.
by MrEldritch 7y ago
This looks surprisingly neat, honestly. I've never used Perl, let alone Perl 6, but I think I see why people cared about it.
- ianai 7y agoIs it officially appropriate to talk about Perl in the past tense?
- JasonFruit 7y agoNo, just about people caring about it. (Okay, that was flip, but Perl has really lost its niche, and not many people are very excited about it now.)
- ryl00 7y agoNah, plenty of people still care about it (I should know, I'm one of them!). And with regular expressions front-and-center in perl, I still find it wonderful for text munging.
- JasonFruit 7y agoMaybe I'm just bitter because of Parrot. I so wanted to use it for my language.
- gpvos 7y agoIs Parrot dead (Monty Python pun intended)? I've lost track of the different Perl 6 implementations and their subparts.
- lizmat 7y agoYes, the Parrot project is in deep, very deep hibernation.
- lizmat 7y agoThen you should maybe have a look at MoarVM (https://moarvm.org https://moarvm.org). It is now the main backend for Raku (née Perl 6) and is all that Parrot was intended to be, and then some. If you want to get into it, you might want to have a look at https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp-internals-course https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp-internals-course (course materials that implemented a Ruby and a PHP on MoarVM).
- JasonFruit 7y agoThat looks extremely promising!
- lmkg 7y agoI think technically yes, because the present tense should be referring to Raku instead.
- ansible 7y agoPerl 5 will continue to be the official "Perl". Development on that continues, and it has an extensive community, though not nearly as large as Python, which was once its peer. What was Perl 6 will, moving forward, be known as "Raku".
- gbacon 7y agoNo. Perl and Raku are different, albeit related, languages.
- pierrec 7y agoI wouldn't read too much into it. "X is dead" is such a common sentiment on HN it's somewhere between funny and tiresome.
- naikrovek 7y agoPerl is pretty great and it was THE language to know before Java took over the enterprise in the early-mid 2000s, and python later. Perl is its own thing, definitely, and it does a lot of things extremely well (though not always extremely fast) using code that is as succinct as you want it to be, sometimes to a fault. It is worth learning because of its utility and because of what it can teach, even though you probably won't use it a lot. Perl 5 documentation still stands out to me as a perfect example of how official language documentation should be. Lots of examples, lots of explanation, standard library and third party modules are named extremely sanely, and it's all just documented so well. Even joke Perl5 modules are documented extremely well; it's just part of the culture that other languages seriously need to adopt.
- mntmoss 7y agoRaku represents quite an advancement on Perl 5. Perl was a "kitchen sink" scripting language when it debuted, and Raku is a modern take on that, which means that it has lots of undiscovered corners still, places that will likely be major programming paradigms of tomorrow.