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I'm a python programmer and this article really makes me interested in Perl. The only problem is that Perl 6 haven't shipped yet in more then 4 years since this

by densh 15y ago

I'm a python programmer and this article really makes me interested in Perl. The only problem is that Perl 6 haven't shipped yet in more then 4 years since this article was written, have it?

sirn 15y ago
I asked the same question few years ago and the answer back then was "there will never be official Perl 6, anything that implements Perl 6 specification is Perl 6." I don't know about other implementations, but latest Rakudo Star[1] was released just a month ago. [1]: https://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads https://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads
joelbd 15y ago
I'm not sure there will be an official Perl 6 shipment. I did recently download the February Rakudo Star (which compiles Perl 6 into Parrot VM bytecode), and I've enjoyed playing around with it. Fair disclosure: I've been writing and loving Perl 5 since 1999. The difficulty right now for anyone from a Perl 5 background who would otherwise jump into Perl 6, is that running your Perl 6 program is really, really slow. I don't know if it's the compile step or execution or something else.
chromatic 15y ago
Ignore the semantic games other responses play. If you're asking "Has anyone released an implementation of Perl 6 that's suitable for everyday use by someone who isn't interested in developing Perl 6 itself?", the answer is no.
- smacktoward 15y ago
  On the positive side, when that implementation of Perl 6 does arrive, it will be delivered to you by flying car free of charge.
- cygx 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, did you finally give Niecza a try or are you still ignoring it out of opposition to anything .NET? I do not (only) ask to be a smart mouth -- I'm genuinely interested in how it rates on your personal scale of production-readiness...
  - chromatic 15y ago
    I haven't used it, primarily due to the risks involved in using Mono for business purposes. (I have no interest in discussing this.) My latest understanding is that it's still a single-developer project with better performance on many benchmarks than Rakudo but much worse startup time and significant feature overlap. It has monthly releases but makes no promises of stability or usability across releases. Again, I haven't used it myself.
- irahul 15y ago
  I asked the same question about a year and half ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568 At that time, you weren't so "perl 6 is not ready" camp. What changed?
  - chromatic 15y ago
    It didn't get any readier in the meantime. If anything, it regressed.
lukeschlather 15y ago
One of my big takeaways from this article is Larry's view on the history of language. He was quite serious when he compared Ada to English, and I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? Might it be a bigger language than English? Might the notion of a "small" programming language being the ideal be somewhat quaint when a CPU with 4GB of integrated memory dances on the head of a pin? Anyway, what I'm getting that is 4 years is a pretty short amount of time now that Larry Wall has made me think about it.
- bdunbar 15y ago
  I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? There is a really excellent SF novel 'A Deepness in the Sky' by Vernor Vinge. It's a few thousand years from now, and one really important job is "Programmer-Archeologist". Their job is to grub around in libraries, find an already existing solution, adapt it to present needs. This is important because without quality automation running your spaceship, you could die. There are hints that some of these libraries are really old: an off-hand comment is made referencing what must be unix epoch.
- kamaal 15y ago
  Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match. Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time. Compared to all languages in its class, Perl hasn't broken backwards compatibility since past 25 years. Python had to break it for some very simple syntax changes. Perl has never done it, not even once in past 25 years. That is quite a feat considering so much syntax has been added to the language since then. Perl 5 has also found a way to add more syntax without dealing with the core by modules like Devel::Declare. So Perl evolution is set for many years. You will see it evolve grow. New neat ideas and many like Moose will find their way into Perl. Basically what makes it special is its hackable, flexible and extensible. And such languages generally stay around for a long time.
sciurus 15y ago
If you're interested, skim through Modern Perl [0].I really like this description from this Amazon review [1]: "I had a hard time characterizing this wonderful book. It explains the fundamentals, but it's not an introductory book like Learning Perl. It covers almost every feature of the Perl 5 language, but it's not a reference book like Programming Perl. It explains common idioms, but it's not a guide to Perl 5 fluency like Effective Perl Programming. It contains many practical suggestions, but it's not a book of tips like Perl Hacks. I can only describe it as a "textbook". If I had to pick a single book to teach Perl 5, this is the one I'd choose. As I read it, I was reminded of the first time I read K&R (C Programming Language) and how much learning was packed into it. (It's the only college programming text I still have). In a slim 250 pages, Modern Perl obsoletes most of my shelf of Perl 5 books. It's not intended for a complete novice to programming (any more than K&R was), but in the hands of a competent programmer or a diligent student it will teach everything that one needs to know to write Perl 5 well." [0] http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EAHI4GHDLQ96/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0977920178&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EAHI4GHDLQ96/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...
- read_wharf 15y ago
  What a great book. I'm skimming the ebook now, and it makes me want to pick up Perl again. Anyone aware of a similar book for Python? For when I, you know, come back to Python after straying into Perl for a few years?
- danssig 15y ago
  The OP was asking about Perl 6, not Perl 5. Perl 6 has enough interesting things that a python programmer might get interested but Perl5 is a pain to use (coming from the python perspective).
kamaal 15y ago
Perl 5 has nothing to do with Perl 6 development or even releases. Even after Perl 6 is released Perl 5 will still continue to evolve and grow. At the moment Perl 6 specification gives a good evolution map for Perl 5 development. So you need not to have to ever worry about Perl 6. Perl 5 is a solid language in itself. Perl has been amazingly useful since almost 25 years now. And anybody who denies this is simply trolling. Its useful for almost anything to everything. From scripting, to application development, to prototyping to building reliable applications in any domain. Perl adapts to nearly every programming paradigm out there. Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible. You also get to benefit from the community experience and knowledge accumulated over years. You get the power of CPAN. There are also amazing resources to learn Perl. Its a tool that you will never stop being in love with. Those of us who have used Perl and pushed its boundaries to get amazing stuff done over years, even now can't write down words to describe its greatness. We can only tell you how great it is, but when you see it yourself you will know it. But the position of any new Perl programmer is enviable to say at the least. He stands at the gates of a city which is going to take him to places he has never seen and experiences he has never been through. Most of them are going to change his life for ever.
- creamyhorror 15y ago
  I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of course, if it's still the best-of-breed then.
  - bgilroy26 15y ago
    If you enjoy Modern Perl, check out Higher Order Perl. It's a guide to functional programming in Perl and it's full of hipster-programmery goodness!
  - kamaal 15y ago
    One way to measure the utility of a language is to see how its users perceive it. Both in the times of technology hype and otherwise. If I look at the Java world, I see most programmers come there because they need a job. I would program in Perl even if I would not be paid for it, just for the fun of it. Its like painting, or playing the piano, or drinking fine wine. I would like to do them, even there is no direct benefit from them. Some languages get a special distinction that its users just love to program in it. Languages and tools like Lisp, C, Perl, Vi, Emacs etc they just never go away. Because someone somewhere is always discovering some goodness in them and is using it. And that process is timeless. These languages have managed to last for decades sometimes their adoption drops, sometimes it peaks, sometimes there is a constant line of usage. But they don't go away. If you read the mailing lists during early days of Perl on comp.lang.perl.* and other writings by people like Tom Christiansen. You will see some unique tone of passion and excitement. The golf competitions, the discussions on one liners, the growth of CPAN, the occasional gems posted on Perl Monks. Great books like Programming Perl, Higher Order Perl and Modern Perl Book and Perl's extreme practical approach and emphasis of 'Getting things done'. I guess for people on Unix platforms who had no other respite but to use C and a mash of other Unix text processing utilities. Or for Java programmers who have to write 10 classes to open a file and do trivial operations. Perl is almost like giving Ice water to somebody in hell.

by densh 15y ago

I'm a python programmer and this article really makes me interested in Perl. The only problem is that Perl 6 haven't shipped yet in more then 4 years since this article was written, have it?

sirn 15y ago

I asked the same question few years ago and the answer back then was "there will never be official Perl 6, anything that implements Perl 6 specification is Perl 6." I don't know about other implementations, but latest Rakudo Star[1] was released just a month ago. [1]: https://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads https://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads

joelbd 15y ago

I'm not sure there will be an official Perl 6 shipment. I did recently download the February Rakudo Star (which compiles Perl 6 into Parrot VM bytecode), and I've enjoyed playing around with it. Fair disclosure: I've been writing and loving Perl 5 since 1999. The difficulty right now for anyone from a Perl 5 background who would otherwise jump into Perl 6, is that running your Perl 6 program is really, really slow. I don't know if it's the compile step or execution or something else.

chromatic 15y ago

Ignore the semantic games other responses play. If you're asking "Has anyone released an implementation of Perl 6 that's suitable for everyday use by someone who isn't interested in developing Perl 6 itself?", the answer is no.

smacktoward 15y ago
On the positive side, when that implementation of Perl 6 does arrive, it will be delivered to you by flying car free of charge.
cygx 15y ago
Out of curiosity, did you finally give Niecza a try or are you still ignoring it out of opposition to anything .NET? I do not (only) ask to be a smart mouth -- I'm genuinely interested in how it rates on your personal scale of production-readiness...
- chromatic 15y ago
  I haven't used it, primarily due to the risks involved in using Mono for business purposes. (I have no interest in discussing this.) My latest understanding is that it's still a single-developer project with better performance on many benchmarks than Rakudo but much worse startup time and significant feature overlap. It has monthly releases but makes no promises of stability or usability across releases. Again, I haven't used it myself.
irahul 15y ago
I asked the same question about a year and half ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568 At that time, you weren't so "perl 6 is not ready" camp. What changed?
- chromatic 15y ago
  It didn't get any readier in the meantime. If anything, it regressed.

lukeschlather 15y ago

One of my big takeaways from this article is Larry's view on the history of language. He was quite serious when he compared Ada to English, and I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? Might it be a bigger language than English? Might the notion of a "small" programming language being the ideal be somewhat quaint when a CPU with 4GB of integrated memory dances on the head of a pin? Anyway, what I'm getting that is 4 years is a pretty short amount of time now that Larry Wall has made me think about it.

bdunbar 15y ago
I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? There is a really excellent SF novel 'A Deepness in the Sky' by Vernor Vinge. It's a few thousand years from now, and one really important job is "Programmer-Archeologist". Their job is to grub around in libraries, find an already existing solution, adapt it to present needs. This is important because without quality automation running your spaceship, you could die. There are hints that some of these libraries are really old: an off-hand comment is made referencing what must be unix epoch.
kamaal 15y ago
Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match. Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time. Compared to all languages in its class, Perl hasn't broken backwards compatibility since past 25 years. Python had to break it for some very simple syntax changes. Perl has never done it, not even once in past 25 years. That is quite a feat considering so much syntax has been added to the language since then. Perl 5 has also found a way to add more syntax without dealing with the core by modules like Devel::Declare. So Perl evolution is set for many years. You will see it evolve grow. New neat ideas and many like Moose will find their way into Perl. Basically what makes it special is its hackable, flexible and extensible. And such languages generally stay around for a long time.

sciurus 15y ago

If you're interested, skim through Modern Perl [0].I really like this description from this Amazon review [1]: "I had a hard time characterizing this wonderful book. It explains the fundamentals, but it's not an introductory book like Learning Perl. It covers almost every feature of the Perl 5 language, but it's not a reference book like Programming Perl. It explains common idioms, but it's not a guide to Perl 5 fluency like Effective Perl Programming. It contains many practical suggestions, but it's not a book of tips like Perl Hacks. I can only describe it as a "textbook". If I had to pick a single book to teach Perl 5, this is the one I'd choose. As I read it, I was reminded of the first time I read K&R (C Programming Language) and how much learning was packed into it. (It's the only college programming text I still have). In a slim 250 pages, Modern Perl obsoletes most of my shelf of Perl 5 books. It's not intended for a complete novice to programming (any more than K&R was), but in the hands of a competent programmer or a diligent student it will teach everything that one needs to know to write Perl 5 well." [0] http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EAHI4GHDLQ96/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0977920178&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EAHI4GHDLQ96/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...

read_wharf 15y ago
What a great book. I'm skimming the ebook now, and it makes me want to pick up Perl again. Anyone aware of a similar book for Python? For when I, you know, come back to Python after straying into Perl for a few years?
danssig 15y ago
The OP was asking about Perl 6, not Perl 5. Perl 6 has enough interesting things that a python programmer might get interested but Perl5 is a pain to use (coming from the python perspective).

kamaal 15y ago

Perl 5 has nothing to do with Perl 6 development or even releases. Even after Perl 6 is released Perl 5 will still continue to evolve and grow. At the moment Perl 6 specification gives a good evolution map for Perl 5 development. So you need not to have to ever worry about Perl 6. Perl 5 is a solid language in itself. Perl has been amazingly useful since almost 25 years now. And anybody who denies this is simply trolling. Its useful for almost anything to everything. From scripting, to application development, to prototyping to building reliable applications in any domain. Perl adapts to nearly every programming paradigm out there. Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible. You also get to benefit from the community experience and knowledge accumulated over years. You get the power of CPAN. There are also amazing resources to learn Perl. Its a tool that you will never stop being in love with. Those of us who have used Perl and pushed its boundaries to get amazing stuff done over years, even now can't write down words to describe its greatness. We can only tell you how great it is, but when you see it yourself you will know it. But the position of any new Perl programmer is enviable to say at the least. He stands at the gates of a city which is going to take him to places he has never seen and experiences he has never been through. Most of them are going to change his life for ever.

creamyhorror 15y ago
I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of course, if it's still the best-of-breed then.
- bgilroy26 15y ago
  If you enjoy Modern Perl, check out Higher Order Perl. It's a guide to functional programming in Perl and it's full of hipster-programmery goodness!
- kamaal 15y ago
  One way to measure the utility of a language is to see how its users perceive it. Both in the times of technology hype and otherwise. If I look at the Java world, I see most programmers come there because they need a job. I would program in Perl even if I would not be paid for it, just for the fun of it. Its like painting, or playing the piano, or drinking fine wine. I would like to do them, even there is no direct benefit from them. Some languages get a special distinction that its users just love to program in it. Languages and tools like Lisp, C, Perl, Vi, Emacs etc they just never go away. Because someone somewhere is always discovering some goodness in them and is using it. And that process is timeless. These languages have managed to last for decades sometimes their adoption drops, sometimes it peaks, sometimes there is a constant line of usage. But they don't go away. If you read the mailing lists during early days of Perl on comp.lang.perl.* and other writings by people like Tom Christiansen. You will see some unique tone of passion and excitement. The golf competitions, the discussions on one liners, the growth of CPAN, the occasional gems posted on Perl Monks. Great books like Programming Perl, Higher Order Perl and Modern Perl Book and Perl's extreme practical approach and emphasis of 'Getting things done'. I guess for people on Unix platforms who had no other respite but to use C and a mash of other Unix text processing utilities. Or for Java programmers who have to write 10 classes to open a file and do trivial operations. Perl is almost like giving Ice water to somebody in hell.