4 ms·

I think the impact of Perl is even bigger than what you are describing. I kind of see Perl as the first language which finally lead the masses out of the wilde

I think the impact of Perl is even bigger than what you are describing. I kind of see Perl as the first language which finally lead the masses out of the wilderness-of-C, and brought forth the light of reference-counting/garbage-collection (no more manual memory management and segfaults), dynamic typing, and "advanced" data structures like hashes/dictionaries (no more off-by-one errors, no more buggy reimplementations with pointer chasing). And actual honest-to-goodness strings, not null-terminated abominations. All without out a syntax that was too scary or unfamiliar. In the 90's Perl was the gateway drug to the more lispy future that we now inhabit.

lmm 12y ago
Maybe. I think people underestimate the importance of TCL, because it was (relatively) buried so shortly after (mostly for political reasons) - it had a lot of influence on Python in particular. But my perspective is of course coloured by my own experience.
Roboprog 12y ago
I like that Perl 5 uses reference counting instead of a full-blown GC and that small scripts start up quickly with a small memory footprint. Alas, Perl 6 went down the garbage collecting virtual machine path, at which point, it has to catch up with Java while trying to differentiate itself from it.
- raiph 12y ago
  What startup delay and RAM usage do you think is just too large to be acceptable for a small script, no matter how good a language/compiler is in other respects?
  - Roboprog 12y ago
    Good question, and I'm not even sure. Perl 5 on my Mac is about 1.2 MB resident to run a one-liner, though, and I'm pretty sure I can't load the JVM in 1 or 2 MB. Need to follow up on that to find smallest practical Java program (as a contrast) Similarly (same laptop), I can get perl to print its version (5.16.2) in about 0.01 secs (2nd time), but java (1.8.0_11-b12) takes about 0.11 secs (2nd time). Most of my work is in Java, but it gets to be a tyrannical hammer that must be used for everything in some minds :-( Again: Parrot having to compete with the JVM makes me sad.
    - raiph 12y ago
      Fwiw most Rakudo devs now prefer MoarVM for most things because it's generally the fastest, leanest, least buggy and most specification compliant of the currently available backends (MoarVM, JVM, Parrot). MoarVM is definitely the right pick for folk who want the leanest startup P6 can deliver. http://moarvm.org/ http://moarvm.org/ Even with the MoarVM backend, Rakudo takes a lot more time and RAM to startup than the compiler for most mainstream languages. It handily beats the JVMs devs use but that's not saying much. On the third hand, a few devs have said they are regularly using Rakudo at $work, including for one-liners. If anyone wants to try P6 I recommend RakudoBrew: https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew

lmm 12y ago

Maybe. I think people underestimate the importance of TCL, because it was (relatively) buried so shortly after (mostly for political reasons) - it had a lot of influence on Python in particular. But my perspective is of course coloured by my own experience.

Roboprog 12y ago

I like that Perl 5 uses reference counting instead of a full-blown GC and that small scripts start up quickly with a small memory footprint. Alas, Perl 6 went down the garbage collecting virtual machine path, at which point, it has to catch up with Java while trying to differentiate itself from it.

raiph 12y ago
What startup delay and RAM usage do you think is just too large to be acceptable for a small script, no matter how good a language/compiler is in other respects?
- Roboprog 12y ago
  Good question, and I'm not even sure. Perl 5 on my Mac is about 1.2 MB resident to run a one-liner, though, and I'm pretty sure I can't load the JVM in 1 or 2 MB. Need to follow up on that to find smallest practical Java program (as a contrast) Similarly (same laptop), I can get perl to print its version (5.16.2) in about 0.01 secs (2nd time), but java (1.8.0_11-b12) takes about 0.11 secs (2nd time). Most of my work is in Java, but it gets to be a tyrannical hammer that must be used for everything in some minds :-( Again: Parrot having to compete with the JVM makes me sad.
  - raiph 12y ago
    Fwiw most Rakudo devs now prefer MoarVM for most things because it's generally the fastest, leanest, least buggy and most specification compliant of the currently available backends (MoarVM, JVM, Parrot). MoarVM is definitely the right pick for folk who want the leanest startup P6 can deliver. http://moarvm.org/ http://moarvm.org/ Even with the MoarVM backend, Rakudo takes a lot more time and RAM to startup than the compiler for most mainstream languages. It handily beats the JVMs devs use but that's not saying much. On the third hand, a few devs have said they are regularly using Rakudo at $work, including for one-liners. If anyone wants to try P6 I recommend RakudoBrew: https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew