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The transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 might go down as one of the great language mismanagements in history. For goodness sake, it's been in design for almost 14
by cygx 13y ago
The transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 might go down as one of the great language mismanagements in history. For goodness sake, it's been in design for almost 14 years!
It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds:
Yes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005.
Guess what got started a year later (2006) and isn't finished yet as well? Rust.
Is it finally time to sit down and learn Perl 6?
Learn it? Certainly. Use it in production? Not yet. The Parrot backend was used to nail down the object system. Supposedly, the mostly-working JVM backend will be used to nail down threading semantics.
Concurrently, they are developing their own VM to get rid of the semantic mismatch between the language runtime and backend VM.
- sampo 13y ago"Yes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005." But if we believe in the Osborne effect, then already from 2000 the announcement of Perl 6 started to eat momentum from Perl 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- bane 13y agoExactly. The early announcements, the O'Reilly book etc. all combined to make me want to stop Perl 5 work and wait a bit for Perl 6 to come out. I was fully expecting to sit down at a machine and type "perl6" instead of "perl" to invoke early versions of the language. I was even willing to deal with semantics changes in the language for a while till that settled down. But 5 years is a long time to wait before implementation even started and 13 years is even worse and still not really be able to sit down at a terminal and "perl6 -v".
- chromatic 13y agoYes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005. Parrot started in 2001, and there was at least one P6 implementation in the works shortly after: https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/9bb281bf85088000ee40079dfc3599375571591a https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/9bb281bf85088000ee40... The Parrot backend was used to nail down the object system. That's not how I remember things. Jonathan may have implemented the current object system on Parrot, but then he prototyped one on the CLR and one on the JVM (or vice versa), then wrote one for Rakudo based on that. Concurrently, they are developing their own VM to get rid of the semantic mismatch between the language runtime and backend VM. That's a very charitable interpretation of what they're doing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]