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As one of the Perl 6 developers, my suggestion would be to wait a couple of months. There have been some very exciting developments with the new JVM backend fo
by colomon 13y ago
As one of the Perl 6 developers, my suggestion would be to wait a couple of months. There have been some very exciting developments with the new JVM backend for Rakudo Perl 6, like new work on threads and very significant speedups on longer processes. But it's not quite yet ready for prime time -- there are definitely still some rough edges. The rate of progress on it has been phenomenal -- it essentially didn't exist at the end of March, and passes 99% of the Rakudo spec tests today. I will be very surprised if the current issues with it still exist in October.
That said, there really haven't been too many major changes to the language itself (as opposed to the implementation) in the last couple of years. I have several modules I wrote 3+ years ago, and keeping them up to date with the language has only required trivial changes in that time. You could certainly start learning the language today using the Parrot implementation with the knowledge that something better will be along very shortly.
- SimHacker 13y agoWhat is the point wasting any time on Perl 6, given it's undeniably unambiguously spectacularly awful track record, and the fact that there are so many other wonderful and better languages available to spend your time learning. There's nothing in Perl 6 that makes it any more powerful (and definitely not any more easy to learn and use and maintain) than any other language. There are no jobs programming Perl 6, and there never will be.
- lelf 13y agoThere's nothing in Perl 6 that makes it any more powerful You're just trolling and clearly haven't got a clue. Object system with MOP, subtyping, pattern-matching, new human readable “regexpes“, grammars etc. And for the first time in humankind it chars in string are counted by not bytes, not 2-bytes, not codepoints, not another shit, but Unicode graphemes! 2013!
- bane 13y agoGrammars and proper unicode support are where my main interests lie with the language. I use Perl to "get shit done" (GSD) it's not sexy, it's not my main job, hell, it's barely reusable. But using Perl has been the difference between failure/late delivery and success/early delivery/under-budget more times than I can even remember. As late as the end of last year I has hacking Perl 5 code as a side project to GSD and took a project that went from not-existing because the scope was unfeasible for the next 3 calendar years to existing and producing measurable results 3 weeks later. That work got me a promotion and then a new better job making more money (and not doing Perl work) and overall joy and happiness because I was the guy that GSD (and Perl made that happen).
- SimHacker 13y agoIf Perl is so great at getting shit done, then maybe they should have written Perl 6 in Perl 5, then they might have gotten shit done in less than a decade.
- chromatic 13y agoPerl 5 isn't magic fairy dust you can sprinkle over a project with no deadlines, no pressure to produce anything, and no idea what it's eventually going to be. It's a language for people who want to get something done and who know what that something is. You are probably thinking of Ruby. Wait, Haskell. Hold up, Erlang. Sorry, Node.js.
- kamaal 13y ago>>What is the point wasting any time on Perl 6 What is the point in spending time on any thing new? >>given it's undeniably unambiguously spectacularly awful track record, How many inventions throughout history fall into these category? Airplanes, Rockets? >>and the fact that there are so many other wonderful and better languages available to spend your time learning. So this will be one of them. >>There's nothing in Perl 6 that makes it any more powerful (and definitely not any more easy to learn and use and maintain) than any other language. Seriously? Have you even read the specification? If Perl 6 sees the light of the day in say an year, it will be the equivalent of what current day 10 languages together would achieve in 10 years from now. >>There are no jobs programming Perl 6, and there never will be. Which is true for any new language ever.
- bane 13y agoI appreciate the honest answer. One of the powers of Perl is that you can sit down at almost any system and type "perl -v" at the command line and get something. How has the penetration been for this to return a v6?
- colomon 13y agoThere's been no such penetration at all. Because current Perl 6 implementations cannot run Perl 5 code, everyone sticks to some version of Perl 5 for "perl" and uses "perl6" when that is wanted. (That said, there are at least two current projects working on getting Perl 5 support up and running in Perl 6.)
- bane 13y agosorry I meant "perl6 -v"
- chromatic 13y agoBy "99% of the Rakudo spec tests today", do you mean "99% as many spec tests as Rakudo on Parrot passes today", or has Rakudo managed to implement 99% of the specification on both the JVM and Parrot now?
- colomon 13y agoThe former. The tests which have never worked on any Perl 6 implementation have not magically started working recently. For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Rakudo JVM passes more tests today than any p6 implementation did at the start of the year. It's just not quite as capable or user-friendly as Rakudo Parrot yet.