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“2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially launches for production use”
- Mithaldu 12y agoAs a related preview, Larry's keynote for the Austrian Perl Workshop last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y (He mostly talks about his travels.)
- lmedinas 12y agoSo Larry uses LinuxMint. Good to know that he sticks to the Free Software principles :)
- beachwood23 12y agoIs that sarcasm? Because Linux Mint certainly includes and provides access to non-free software.
- baldfat 12y agoGNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software. Any OS provides access to non-free software.
- lmz 12y ago> GNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software Correct. That's why Debian is not in this list of Free GNU/Linux Distributions: http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
- baldfat 12y agoI can still compile non-free software to any Distro on FSF's list. The policy is if the official repos have non-free software. You can always install non-free on any of the FSF listed distros also. Also I think the world has moved past FSF when you just look at the distro names. Very small communities.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- klodolph 12y agoI wonder what kind of community will grow up around Perl 6.
- aduitsis 12y agoIf they have any similarity with Perl 5, I can only imagine good things.
- oblio 12y agoThe real question is: can they get Perl 6 off the ground? It took 6 years for Python 3 to reach a decent level of usage and recognition (http://python3wos.appspot.com/ http://python3wos.appspot.com/), and that was with mostly minor language changes. Perl 6 has been 14 years in the making and still doesn't have a stable version. Mindshare will be very hard to come by at this point.
- grondilu 12y agoWell, as you pointed out, Python 3 differs from Python 2 only with minor languages changes. Perl 6 is drastically different from Perl 5 (though clearly in the same lineage). Not only the language is quite different, but so is the design of the implementation. So it's not much comparable.
- oblio 12y agoMy logic is: Small changes = slow adoption. Large changes = ? While this does not apply to every situation, unless Perl 6 somehow manages to create a huge wave of hype, I'm not going to bet on it :)
- sigzero 12y agoI would agree with that logic. Don't look for a wave of P5 programmers to switch.
- progman 12y ago
- grondilu 12y agoIIRC, this was a premature claim that has been written without any consulting of the actual Perl 6 community: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218 http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218
- untothebreach 12y agoI'm confused...the post says that the speaker is Larry Wall. Is he really considered a 'random outsider' to the Perl 6 community?
- colomon 12y agoLarry is very involved in Perl 6[1]. I'm not sure what grondilu was thinking there. While as far as I know Larry sprang that on the rest of us, the general reaction I've seen has been that the gauntlet has been thrown down, and we've got to live up to it. [1] https://github.com/TimToady https://github.com/TimToady
- grondilu 12y agoThe speaker is Larry Wall but I interpreted timotimo's quote as meaning that the abstract on the FOSDEM page, along with the pseudo-announcement, has not been written by Larry himself.
- tormeh 12y agoWhat's supposed to be so great about Perl 6? I associate Perl with inscrutable cat-walked-on-the-keyboard programs and little else. Can someone in the know explain?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Tepix 12y agoYou may want to read the Apocalypse documents ( http://perl6.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html http://perl6.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html ) and the Exegeses ( http://perl6.org/archive/doc/exegesis.html http://perl6.org/archive/doc/exegesis.html ). Perl 6 improves upon Perl 5 in countless ways. One of the strongest parts of perl, the regular expressions, have received further improvements. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules Finally, if you are familiar with Perl 5, there's special documentation for you at http://perlgeek.de/en/article/5-to-6 http://perlgeek.de/en/article/5-to-6
- progman 12y ago> One of the strongest parts of perl, the regular expressions ... ... have been copied to Nimrod (now called "Nim") -- even with native C performance and native Perl syntax. http://nimrod-lang.org/re.html http://nimrod-lang.org/re.html Perl had its time and lost many of its users (including me) "thanks" to the inacceptable delay. Meanwhile the competitional advantage of Perl 6 is completely gone because many new features have also been implemented in other languages (Rust for instance), even in dinosaurs like Java and C++.
- raiph 12y agoPCRE wrappers like the module you linked don't give other langs the nice regex integration available in Perl 5, they just give them support for "Perl Compatible Regular Expressions" (hence PCRE), a rough equivalent of P5's regex functionality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Expressions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Express... But PCRE is 1990's parsing technology. Who cares if Nim copies parts of P5 regex via PCRE? The page you linked says "Consider using the pegs module instead.". PEGs, invented in 2004, are more powerful than regex, PCRE ones or otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar Perl 6 has Perl 6 rules, a unification of PEGs, regex, and lexical closures, built right in to the language. There's nothing like them in Nim, Java, or C++. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules
- diakritikal 12y agobut, but, but... Netcraft has confirmed: Perl is dying!
- huskyr 12y agoSo, will 2015 also finally be the year of Linux on the Desktop?
- lmedinas 12y agoI guess that's up to Chrome OS and Steam OS :)
- lorenzfx 12y agoWith steam machines it might well be (or perhaps the year of Linux in the living room).
- gilgoomesh 12y agoLinux is already in the living room. Linux already powers many (most?) smart TVs, many digital video recorders and all Android devices.
- nilsjuenemann 12y agoI am still waiting for Hurd.
- Svip 12y agoWhen will be the Year of Hurd on the Desktop?
- zvrba 12y agoCompiler feature matrix: http://perl6.org/compilers/features http://perl6.org/compilers/features Note that there is also a JVM target. This is exciting!
- pfortuny 12y agoIt is a pity that the concurrency column is as red as it is. I hope it does not end up like Perl threads. It would be so nice to have easy threads in this language.
- pjmlp 12y agoDoes it still matter? My last line of Perl at work was back in 2005. Since then, our clients have been using Python, Groovy and Powershell code for the same set of tasks.
- philbarr 12y agoI know this is ever so slightly off topic, but is Groovy in popular use these days? I seem to see it mentioned quite a lot recently. If so, what for? General scripting tasks?
- pjmlp 12y agoThe Groovy use case was a bit crazy. It was on a corporation that was replacing their HP-UX/Perl/C++/CORBA infrastructure with JEE/Java/Red-Hat Linux. The new sysadmins (newly grads) just started replacing the existing, battle tested Perl scripts with Groovy ones. The only reason pointed out was that they couldn't grok Perl. As for its use in general, here in Germany it seems to have been replaced by Scala/Clojure. When Rails was hype, the JUGs around my area used to be full of Grails and other Groovy related sessions. Nowadays it seldom comes up in the agenda.
- laichzeit0 12y agoGroovy is one of the best kept secrets of the JVM scripting world. I hardly _ever_ write pure Java if I can do it in Groovy instead. Look at how insanely easy parallel programming is in Groovy using gpars: http://gpars.codehaus.org/ http://gpars.codehaus.org/ It's literally: GParsPool.withPool { def result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].collectParallel {it * 2} } Why oh why people still torture themselves with pure Java.
- pjmlp 12y ago> Why oh why people still torture themselves with pure Java. Customer requirements.
- raiph 12y agoAn equivalent in P6: [1,2,3,4,5] X* 2 This (theoretically) parallel processes and then puts the results back in order. The X is the cross metaoperator; it applies the following operator (the * symbol which is the multiply operator) to each of the combinations of the items in the lists on its left and right, and does so in parallel if the compiler so chooses, and ensures the results are returned as if it was processed sequentially.
- tempodox 12y agoAfter a quick look, Perl 6 still looks like $#%&@ to me. I don't see why anyone would bother. When Python 3 came around, I thought it was a good idea and that everyone would want to migrate as soon as possible. What we got instead is 3 more parallel installs of language versions. Beside Py-2.7 (which will apparently never go away), you will need Py-3.3, 3.4 AND 3.5 because every project wants a different one. Why would anyone want the same drama with Perl?
- ghshephard 12y agoCan you name anything in Python 3.3 or 3.4 that doesn't work flawlessly in 3.5?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- esaym 12y agoPython, now with 4 ways to do it! Now on a more serious note, the perl community has always had a goal of backwards compatibility. When was the last time you heard someone having to update their perl5 interpreter to get something to work? Perl6 will be similar I assume, it can even in a limited way run perl5 code. I've stuck with perl through the years just because of this. So you use perl to avoid those same issues you speak of.
- raiph 12y ago> Perl 6 ... can even in a limited way run perl5 code. I'm curious what limits you are referring to. (Are you aware of https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5? https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5?)
- esaym 12y agoNot any limits per se. Was just pointing out that you can't simply run perl5 straight through the perl6 vm and have it work magically.
- 12y ago
- esaym 12y agoA yapc europe talk mentions even more features: http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704 http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704
- bane 12y agoIf this is true, I'm incredibly excited. Perl is like a girl I used to love, broke up with, but never got over. I'm eager to start hacking on Perl 6 code, but don't want to put the time in dealing with preproduction versions of the language. Very exciting.
- raldi 12y agoTo me, Perl was a girl like none I'd ever met, strange and wild and inspiring! But polite society rejected her... it was just because they didn't really know her. My parents said she was trouble and banished her from our home. I loved her so much I would sneak out at night and find any way I could to spend some time with her. (Wait, or is this the plot of Phantom of the Opera? I'm bad at musicals.)
- rurban 12y agoUnfortunately I cannot recommend the parrot backend for production use yet. We recently found a serious GC bug which is reproducible under very tight memory constraints, such as my mips box with 256MB RAM or with very big perl6 modules. I'm working on it for a week already and cannot promise to be finished until Jan 31, 2015. But the other 2 backends, jvm and moar, are doing fine.
- lazyloop 12y agoParrot should just be abandoned, MoarVM is the way to go.
- rurban 12y agoIf you care about small perl6 apps, which do not have to scale with concurrent CPUs, yes. But parrot has a much bigger scale. And lock-free threads.
- raiph 12y agoLarry Wall is not saying P6 will be declared "officially production ready" on Jan 31st 2015. He's saying the devs are aiming to declare that sometime in 2015, quite plausibly Dec 1st 2015 or somesuch.
- barbudorojo 12y agoI would like Perl to be the Perfect Extended Ruby Language. Sometime ago, there was a post from some Perl people about using Scala for the next Perl. Today Haskell, Clojure, Julia, Scala, Ruby and Lisp (batteries provided by quicklisp) are very big contenders. Perl has cpan but I think the Perl community is really small, the great exodus happened long ago. Perl can make you feel as a real hacker, also J, but cryptic syntaxes is no longer buying you anything. How can anyone seriously take any credibility to a calendar when Perl 6 has been delayed for ever. Perl 6 is not the gift that Perl 5 was hoping to receive, Perl 6 is a modest advance not a revolution. Today, now, we need much more. I wish Perl 6 the best, but I doesn't believe it will gets much traction. Edited: Grammar. Summary: Too little, too late, there is no longer confidence.
- esaym 12y agoHonestly, there are so many (too many) languages out there now. I highly doubt any of them has more than 100 regular contributers. Perl built an awesome foundation because in the beginning, that was all there was so you had 1000's of regular contributers to the core and cpan. I don't think any language will ever see that kind of activity again. Perl6 has a lot going for it though. I believe with its new OO system, concurrency similar to Go, and the ability to compile to a binary, might take this new language to places where Ruby, Python, Perl5 can't go. And in the similar perl5 fashion, it will be the programmers and not the corporates that own it. Therefore one is only limited by their imagination and not their pocket book.
- drostie 12y agoDo you mean contributors to the core or to the package system? Because NPM (for Node.js) has a cool way to browse the recent updates at 100/page at https://www.npmjs.org/browse/updated https://www.npmjs.org/browse/updated and so far today over 500 modules have been updated. We live in a much bigger world than Perl was, so that's not surprising. The huge trouble is that these hackers don't talk much to each other.
- eCa 12y ago
- rafekett 12y agohopefully all my cryptic perl5 1-liners will still work.
- eCa 12y agoPerl 5 is not going away for a long time.
- Diederich 12y agoI've been writing Perl every day, at work and at home, since 1993, ranging from mission critical operational components in the USAF, to automation that produced many 9's of network availability in a 'fortune 10' giant, to innovative operational management and process systems in a Silicon Valley (kind of) startup, to some pretty interesting stuff at my current company (SAP). Perl 5 has certainly paid the bills. I have taught it to hot-shot C programmers and mainframe Cobol programmers alike in a community college. Perl 5, by any modern standard, is, at best, a 'quaint' language. Perl 6 is literally everything I wanted Perl 5 to be. The incremental data typing is very exciting. The regular syntax is going to make it even easier to teach. And there are so many other well considered and awesome features. And I just get giddy when I think of the amazing things that really smart people are going to make with Perl 6. It's powerful from the top of its head to the bottom of its feet. And I think that it's going to be a very fast language too. Thank you, Perl. Thanks to the many people who have made it possible. May my 13+ years of high hopes not be in vain!
- jspiral 12y agoI haven't touched Perl in quite a long time. For the type of automation stuff you are doing, i'd likely use python or ruby, depending on the nature of the problem. Would you say people like me should be looking hard at Perl 6? I'm curious what the benefits would be.
- Diederich 12y agoAt least for the past decade or so, I would (roughly and humbly) put Ruby and Python on par with Perl 5 for the purposes of system administration, with a whole lot of pros, cons and caveats. Very roughly. It's just that, as a language, Perl has always resonated with me, even though I've rather enjoyed writing in both Ruby and Python. Assuming you are akin to 'Jill Sysadmin' or 'Joe Devops', I would honestly say that Perl 6 won't be more compelling than Perl 5 for a while. And, by the way, Perl 5 has grown enormously in the past 10 years. I would say that if you haven't taken a look in a while, give it another shake. I honestly struggle to imagine the really cool things that will start to come out of Perl 6 acceleration. It has some really novel concurrency concepts, far more interesting than goroutines, for instance. And once again, I believe Perl 6 will turn into a very fast language.
- lawnchair_larry 12y agoPerl is easily the worst language that the world has ever known. Let's just forget that mistake and move on.
- BenGoldberg 12y agoYou consider awk, sed, and bash to be better programming languages than perl? You're funny.
- BenGoldberg 12y ago2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially announces the date on which it will launch for production use.
- baldfat 12y ago2015 Half Life 3 can be announced
- tylermac1 12y ago2015. 5 - (1 * 0) - 2 = 3. Confirmed.
- mgarfias 12y agoHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
- davidy123 12y agoTo me Perl is the monk's language. Not very friendly monks either. Solitary monks, except when they're talking about the virtues of Perl with each other. Except within intentional cloisters, it's not a good language to use for largescale or outward looking projects.