Slashdot Mirror

The first link I clicked on in Best of Rosettacode Perl 6 examples was https://examples.perl6.org/cat...
You can create your own grammars in Perl 6! Many times I have wanted to implement a DSL for my programs, but the barrier to entry is so high with learning YACC and LEX. I think it's worth taking a look at for this alone, and that was just the first thing I clicked on. If it weren't for your comment I don't think I would have taken the time to check it out. Thanks!

I think you ought to test/validate your assumptions and consider evaluating what Perl 6 has to offer. Many of the core Perl 6 developers had little experience or interest in Perl 5. The pace of development and number of committers seems to be accelerating.

Performance has gotten about 4 times faster in the last year.

The developer ecosystem is maturing. CPAN6 is here.

Perl 6 provides Inline::Perl5. Which allows backward compatible access to and mixing of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It also allows you to specify a versioned dialect of Perl 6. So in ~10 years when Perl 6.i is released. Your code targeting Perl 6.d functionality which has been deprecated in 6.e and removed in 6.f will still work.

The design and implementation of Perl 6 is clean and heavily influenced by Paul Graham's essay on The Hundred-Year Language. Most of Perl 6 is written in both Perl 6 and a subset of Perl 6 called Not Quite Perl (NQP). Which means Perl developers don't need to learn another language to become core developers.

Larry said that acceleration beats velocity. Perl 6 certainly seems to be accelerating. If you watch the video... there's a lot of exciting things baked into Perl 6. However the focus is on getting things right, clean, and fast (in that order). If/when performance gets within ~10-20% of Perl 5, Python, etc... I think the expressiveness and strangely consistent and clean language design will prompt many to re-evaluate their concept of Perl.

By the way, the Perl 6 way of doing this is:

# read entire file as (Unicode) Str
my $text_contents = slurp "path/to/file";

See: https://docs.perl6.org/routine/slurp.html:

And the same thing can be done in perl 5 with the CPAN module Perl6::Slurp: https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl6::Slurp

I look forward to hearing why Python's chained method call syntax is so much more newbie-friendly than a single, colorfully-named built-in command.

Too bad van Rossum fucked up the transition to version 3.

Actually, Guido didn't "fuck up" the transition to Python 3. It was done almost perfectly.

People using Python 2 haven't been affected by it much. They can upgrade whenever they want, and Python 2 has still seen excellent support from the Python maintainers.

Meanwhile, Python 3 has been able to resolve some serious problems with Python 2, providing a much richer and more useful language. Developers have been moving to Python 3 at their own pace, which is exactly how it should be!

Now that Python 3 has proven itself, it's seeing widespread adoption within the Python community. It's what almost everyone is using for new code.

If you want to see an example of a real fuck up, look at Perl 6. That's a real disaster! Here we are, over 15 years later, and there's still so little to show. Rakudo is an awful joke. Even the Perl 6 logo is goddamn childish.

Another example of a really fucked up programming language is Rust. They kept promising Rust 1.0, and then it kept getting pushed back again and again. But while this was happening the language was changing significantly almost every day. So code you wrote on a Monday often wouldn't compile at all by the following Wednesday, and would need significant reworking by the following Friday! The first impression a lot of people got about Rust was a lack of stability and having to rewrite their code every week. Even the 1.0 release was pathetic. Despite being "stable" releases, it took them up until Rust 1.6 to get their libcore stable!

Perl6 Design Docs: https://design.perl6.org/

Yes, that is exactly the page which led me to make my comment.

Perl 6 has not been released "after 15 years of work". It has been marred by one disaster after another. It has been released after 15 years of failure.

Those who have been following its development then entire time will remember the Parrot virtual machine shenanigans, which wasted many years, and prevented a usable Perl 6 implementation from becoming available.

Then there was the Pugs implementation of it, which actually seemed slightly promising at first. That, of course, turned into a disaster when the lead programmer decided to change his gender. (I'm not even joking!)

There's also Perl 6's absurd logo, which renders Perl 6 unusable in any serious environment. We'd be laughed at if we showed the Perl 6 home page to managers, executives or clients when advocating for the use of Perl 6. They'd think we were pulling their leg by using a language with such a childish logo.

Lately the focus has been on Rakudo which has taken years to produce something even minimally useful. I've read reports that it's slow and forces you to use some obscure MoarVM they've created (this sounds to me like they're on the road to another Parrot-style failure!) or the JVM.

Perl 6 has been a shameful episode in the history of programming languages. It's even worse that it has permanently tainted the Perl name.

The Perl 6 Architect writes about the 7-8 years work put in to get this far at https://6guts.wordpress.com/20...

"In the coming days, weâ(TM)ll also produce a Rakudo Star release â" which consists of the compiler along with documentation and a selection of modules â" and that will also have an MSI, to make life easier for Windows folks."

There will also be perl 6 speedups in a series of monthly releases next year.

A good starting point with download instructions and docs links is
http://perl6.org/downloads/

Have fun!

to Perl's credit they defined regex conventions for other languages

Yes, but the Perl designer also learned from his mistakes (regexp become hard to maintain) to build a new regexp language ("grammars"), both more powerful, more generic and more readable and it's coming in Perl 6.
http://doc.perl6.org/language/...

The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.

http://perl6.org/compilers/features

That list shows "Rakudo" having most of the features in place already...

I love Perl, but I'm curious. Whatever happened to Perl 6? I remember hearing about it way back when I was in grad school, which was a long time ago.

Perl 6 isn't dead, per se. A quick google search shows that there are a few implementations running around, although none are even close to production-ready yet. Here's the Perl 6 portal, in case you were wondering.

I did run and download one of the more complete implementations, and part of the problem I think is that perl 6 is not ANYTHING like perl 5. The reason I use perl at all, and the only reason I still use perl 5 TO THIS DAY is the regex capabilities. They completely ripped that out of perl 6 and re-implemented it to make it more user-friendly, and they did so poorly, IMHO. Instead of calling htis perl 6, they should have named it something completely different. Call it "perl" does a disservice to what made perl so powerful in the first place.

The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.

http://perl6.org/compilers/features

Its kind of like that Arthur Clarke story "The Nine Billion Names of God". If, one night, you glance at the sky and see the stars start going out, you'll know that someone has finally implemented all the Perl6 features. Either that, or its cloudy and going to rain.

Wouldn't that be Perl6?

If you're looking for Perl 6 coders, you might try their IRC channel, #perl6 on Freenode.

I like how he mentions perl, but completed neglects to mention Perl6.

One of the most derided or most lauded features (depending on your POV) in perl6 is the copious use of additional syntax operators in the interests of further Huffman coding. There are certain operators (for example, the "hyper" operators that are defined in terms of unicode symbols ("") and use ASCII digraphs as an alternate form (">>").

So, it's there now in a mostly stable form... you can program in unicode-laced form all you like at this point.

Rakudo Star includes a PDF of the Perl 6 introduction book; the print version should come out late next month. Moritz Lenz's Perl 5 to 6 article series is always informative and useful. The official Perl 6 site's documentation page links to current and accurate documentation.

Perl 6 is mainly usable, and some form of it is being used in production at multiple sites. It's just not ready for public "launch" yet. If you really want it, you can get it. Perl6.org has it.

Perl 5 hasn't exactly been sitting still the past decade. The changes between 5.6 and 5.8 or 5.8 and 5.10 are huge. I haven't looked over the full changes list for 5.12 yet, but it sure isn't the language Perl 5 was in 2000.

Talking about Perl, this is the official Perl 6 site:

http://perl6.org/

Srsly :P

PERL 6, however, seems to be dead. I've been following its progress for a couple years now and it is going almost nowhere.

The decision to move to a bytecode interpreter looks like a huge mistake. Most people are fine without the bytecode interpreter

and it has split off dev resources from the issues that would help your everyday user -- "syntactic sugar".

OO support is also lousy in the current PERL.

The feature request framework was also lacking.

Everything went up to Larry Wall, who decided things basically as God.

I saw at least one simple and powerul thing dismissed out of hand -- a built in loop counter.

The stated goal of PERL6 was improving XS, but this doesn't require a bytecode interpreter either.

Of course, this is all running off volunteer labor so I shouldn't complain too much!

perl6