3 ms·

I think more than anything it was an error in the messaging. Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started

I think more than anything it was an error in the messaging. Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, since people assumed that Perl 5 would be soon dead, and Perl 6 had a new different syntax. And then it took 15 years to happen, during which Python and others ate its lunch. I think a more successful strategy would have been to make it clear very early on that Perl 6 would be some sort of long term experimental project, and that Perl 5 would be expected to be a thing for a long time still. If in 2015 Perl 5 still had a thriving ecosystem, and there was a demand of Perl-like but better, then Perl 6 could have been more successful. But in the current timeline it's a successor to an almost defunct language, and isn't such an attractive proposition.

atweiden 4y ago
Have you used Raku before? The new and improved regex syntax [1] IMHO completely obsoletes legacy PCRE. Writing regexes in other languages feels like stepping into an ICE vehicle after driving a Tesla: so crufty and old and obvious legacy. Raku’s built-in grammars make parsers trivial to write. I effortlessly created two [2] — one for reordering fstab entries, and the other for converting human-readable LUKS offsets into cryptsetup sectors — on a lazy afternoon. Grammars in Raku make this second nature. Then you have Raku’s multi-dispatch. It is more capable than Erlang/Elixir pattern matching: # a list with at least one element, extracting the head and tail multi sub tail(*@list ($head, *@tail)) { @tail } multi sub tail(*@list) { @list } [3] ==> tail() ==> say(); # [] [3, 4] ==> tail() ==> say(); # [4] # pattern matching with arbitrary guards multi sub user($name where { is-valid-user($_) }) { $name.say } multi sub user($name) { "invalid name: $name".say } sub is-valid-user($name) { # notice the additive character class in this regex: “letters plus digits” # fail the match if $name is root try with $name ~~ /(<+:Letter +digit>+)/ { $0 ne 'root' or fail }; $!.not } user('name'); # name user('1234'); # 1234 user('root'); # invalid name: root class Coordinates { has $.latitude is required; has $.longitude is required; } class City { has Str:D $.name is required; has Str:D $.state is required; has Str:D $.country is required; has Coordinates:D $.coordinates is required; } my $latitude = -37.840935; my $longitude = 144.946457; my Coordinates $coordinates .= new(:$latitude, :$longitude); my Str:D $name = 'Melbourne'; my Str:D $state = 'Victoria'; my Str:D $country = 'Australia'; my City $melbourne .= new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates); my City:D $sydney = do { my Coordinates:D $coordinates = do { my $latitude = -33.86514; my $longitude = 151.209900; Coordinates.new(:$latitude, :$longitude); }; my Str:D $name = 'Sydney'; my Str:D $state = 'New South Wales'; my Str:D $country = 'Australia'; City.new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates); }; # deeply nested argument deconstruction multi sub melbourne-or-bust( City:D $city ( Str:D :$name where 'Melbourne', Str:D :$state, Str:D :$country, :$coordinates ( :$latitude, :$longitude ) ) ) { my $gist = qq:to/EOF/.trim; Welcome to the city of $name. It’s located in $state, $country. GPS coordinates: $latitude, $longitude EOF $gist.say; } multi sub melbourne-or-bust(City:D $city) { 'This isn’t Melbourne.'.say; } melbourne-or-bust($melbourne); # Welcome to the city of Melbourne ... melbourne-or-bust($sydney); # This isn’t Melbourne > Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today. > Perl 6 had a new different syntax. Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases. [1]: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_expressions_(_regex_/_regexp_) https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_express... [2]: https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault [3]: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5 https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5
lizmat 4y ago
> Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 In 2000, for all intents and purposes, Perl 6 was the successor of Perl 5. And one of the reasons the project was started, was because Perl 5 was already dying at that point. Not only losing the web server competition to PHP, but also from internal battles, close to civil war. The internal battles ceased for a while when the Perl 6 process was started. But around 2008, it became a war between Perl 5 and Perl 6. To squelch that, the sister language meme was born. But that just meant a cease-fire, rather than peace, and the dissent and resentments continued to fester under the blanket of the sister language meme. Until 2019, when the rename of Perl 6 to the Raku Programming Language happened. Factions within Perl 5 lost their common enemy, and fighting could start all over again. Which caused at least one pumpking to resign. To mark Perl 6 as the cause for Perl 5's demise, is incorrect. Perl 6 was one of the effects of Perl 5's demise. Meanwhile the Raku Programming Language continues to build a programming language of the future. You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News if you want to stay up-to-date on developments https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog

atweiden 4y ago

Have you used Raku before? The new and improved regex syntax [1] IMHO completely obsoletes legacy PCRE. Writing regexes in other languages feels like stepping into an ICE vehicle after driving a Tesla: so crufty and old and obvious legacy. Raku’s built-in grammars make parsers trivial to write. I effortlessly created two [2] — one for reordering fstab entries, and the other for converting human-readable LUKS offsets into cryptsetup sectors — on a lazy afternoon. Grammars in Raku make this second nature. Then you have Raku’s multi-dispatch. It is more capable than Erlang/Elixir pattern matching: # a list with at least one element, extracting the head and tail multi sub tail(*@list ($head, *@tail)) { @tail } multi sub tail(*@list) { @list } [3] ==> tail() ==> say(); # [] [3, 4] ==> tail() ==> say(); # [4] # pattern matching with arbitrary guards multi sub user($name where { is-valid-user($_) }) { $name.say } multi sub user($name) { "invalid name: $name".say } sub is-valid-user($name) { # notice the additive character class in this regex: “letters plus digits” # fail the match if $name is root try with $name ~~ /(<+:Letter +digit>+)/ { $0 ne 'root' or fail }; $!.not } user('name'); # name user('1234'); # 1234 user('root'); # invalid name: root class Coordinates { has $.latitude is required; has $.longitude is required; } class City { has Str:D $.name is required; has Str:D $.state is required; has Str:D $.country is required; has Coordinates:D $.coordinates is required; } my $latitude = -37.840935; my $longitude = 144.946457; my Coordinates $coordinates .= new(:$latitude, :$longitude); my Str:D $name = 'Melbourne'; my Str:D $state = 'Victoria'; my Str:D $country = 'Australia'; my City $melbourne .= new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates); my City:D $sydney = do { my Coordinates:D $coordinates = do { my $latitude = -33.86514; my $longitude = 151.209900; Coordinates.new(:$latitude, :$longitude); }; my Str:D $name = 'Sydney'; my Str:D $state = 'New South Wales'; my Str:D $country = 'Australia'; City.new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates); }; # deeply nested argument deconstruction multi sub melbourne-or-bust( City:D $city ( Str:D :$name where 'Melbourne', Str:D :$state, Str:D :$country, :$coordinates ( :$latitude, :$longitude ) ) ) { my $gist = qq:to/EOF/.trim; Welcome to the city of $name. It’s located in $state, $country. GPS coordinates: $latitude, $longitude EOF $gist.say; } multi sub melbourne-or-bust(City:D $city) { 'This isn’t Melbourne.'.say; } melbourne-or-bust($melbourne); # Welcome to the city of Melbourne ... melbourne-or-bust($sydney); # This isn’t Melbourne > Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today. > Perl 6 had a new different syntax. Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases. [1]: https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_expressions_(_regex_/_regexp_) https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_express... [2]: https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault [3]: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5 https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

lizmat 4y ago

> Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 In 2000, for all intents and purposes, Perl 6 was the successor of Perl 5. And one of the reasons the project was started, was because Perl 5 was already dying at that point. Not only losing the web server competition to PHP, but also from internal battles, close to civil war. The internal battles ceased for a while when the Perl 6 process was started. But around 2008, it became a war between Perl 5 and Perl 6. To squelch that, the sister language meme was born. But that just meant a cease-fire, rather than peace, and the dissent and resentments continued to fester under the blanket of the sister language meme. Until 2019, when the rename of Perl 6 to the Raku Programming Language happened. Factions within Perl 5 lost their common enemy, and fighting could start all over again. Which caused at least one pumpking to resign. To mark Perl 6 as the cause for Perl 5's demise, is incorrect. Perl 6 was one of the effects of Perl 5's demise. Meanwhile the Raku Programming Language continues to build a programming language of the future. You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News if you want to stay up-to-date on developments https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog