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Perl 6: Apocalypse 6 Released
data64 writes "The latest Apocalypse talks about subroutines. Looks like we finally get type signatures which are way more powerful than the rudimentary prototypes available with Perl5."
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Doubtful... The Debian crew has always held that simplicity is best (Occam's Razor). They typically do all their scripts in Python.
The VM is showing 10x speed improvements in preliminary tests. Couple that in with Moore's law and Perl (or any languages that compiles to the Parrot VM) becomes a very attractive language for more types of problems.
This is why perl will disappear.
I can understand some obscurity in lower level languages, like C, or as low as ASM itself. But a higher level scripting language should be as close to english (or another human language) as possible.
I dont see the inherent advantage in desinging a language thats hard to read. Frankly I'd rather see scripts written in VBScript than perl.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The problem with the English language is that it's too ambiguous. While that makes for wonderful poetry, literature, and stories, it makes for horrible programming syntax or anything relating strictly to logic. Think of why mathematicians had to create the word "iff."
It can also make things *harder*. The grammar and syntax of English is very fast and loose, but well known to it's speakers. Most likely the English-based programming language won't be able to mimic every little natural-language nuance, leaving the developer the headache of remember what rules are followed in which and when. When one says "or" in common, everyday conversation, it generally means an exclusive "or." When I say "or" in just about programming language, it means an inclusive "or." In an English language development language do you worry about conjugating verbs? What about tenses? Etc. You get the drift.
Using English keywords is great & helps simplify the problem, but as someone way smarter than me said "Things should be made as simple as possible -- but no simpler."
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Heres the thing though, sure I have no idea what that says, but that's just because somebody decided to be very clever/brief/or both. Half my job is to write Perl scripts and sure there are about a million neato tricks that I could use to make my code really short and impossible to read but I never learned them and have no intention to. If you want, Perl can look more or less exactly like C, or if you want it can look like the above. It's all a matter of what you want out of perl.
When they say theres more than one way to do it, syntax is included in there too.
You can write readable code in perl. It's just that a lot of scripters like to make their code as compact as possible, sacrificing readability for...I don't know what. When I write perl scripts, I write them so that I'll understand what I was doing when I look at it 6 months later.
I am a Perl fanatic. I love Perl. But what is going on with Perl 6? The guys working on the Parrot VM for Perl 6 are doing such an amazing job, but I'm pretty dismayed about the language development on Perl 6 itself.
Perl 6 was meant to be a total rewrite. Nothing was meant to be sacred, cruft could disappear, and we'd be left with a mean language, true to its roots, and working on a hot new VM.
Instead we get stuff like this:
sub *print (*@list)
Talk about confusing! * signifies a glob, but in the above example the first * signifies a sort of 'package wildcard' meaning that the subroutine is global! The second *, however, is a glob, as in Perl 5. WTF? Perl 6 looks almost as inconsistent as PHP already, and it's only in draft!
Each page of this Apocalypse presented me with a new piece of cruft to look horrified about. Slurpy arrays!? Oh my god. Wall even goes on about 'psychological reasons' for syntax! 'Default values' and 'Rules' are things that are easily done with existing code.. it's not even as if they result in particularly crufty code in Perl 5.
I'm still looking forward to Perl 6, but it really does seem as if Parrot is where the true action is. Perl 6 really does look as if it is being designed by committee.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Considering all the features available, it seems like this would be the ideal time to freshen up slashcode. Then, maybe we'd see valid HTML 4, CSS support, layout without n-level deep tables, etc.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Perl has always had a lot of esoterica. Don't let it bog you down. You can be amazingly productive in perl without ever knowing what a typeglob is.
I think I have been trolled, but I'll reply anyway.
:'s in it.
Once I was bored and wrote one line of C code that iterated over an array, and printed its elements separating then with commas, and printed an "and" instead of a comma for the last element. The code consisted of a for, a printf, and ?
Now, don't try to tell me it was readable. Every language can be used to write horrible code.
Besides, that doesn't even look as Perl. "?$where" makes no syntactical sense, variables have names like $where and that's it, "Str + $label" makes no sense either, unless Str is a constant, and "Int +$skip = 0" makes about as much sense as in C, because supposing it's comparing an addition with 0 it should be using ==.
and that's a good thing?
:) (assuming it saves as much info as Java does in the byte-code)
.Net issue. If the program can be converted between the languages that the CLR supports, it would be infinitely more useful. If Perl can convert between any of the million dialects that any given user will use, then it stands a chance of making it much easier for people to share perl code.
I don't know about you, but I like my languages to be pretty static. You can't really learn a language that's different everyday. Also, I don't like languages that let you do things 80 different ways. There are enough fights over where the curley braces go. Perl is not a team sport. Open source perl scripts are slightly less open than open source programs.
Now, if Parrot has only one instruction for things like "until" and "while", and someone wrote a decompiler that supported each person's own style of programming, then we may be in business
This is kind of like the whole
Karma Clown
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
When does the book come out? Larry Wall's Perl 5 manual was the most fun I've had reading a computer book. Is he going to top it with the Perl 6 book?
your objection might have some legs if you had at least used vlid perl code.
I can make ANY language look bad if I can break the rules.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Why did you start using Perl in the 5.4 days if you wanted a highly stable language? Perl was undergoing rapid change at that point, and there was talk of much more (like the merger with Java, and getting rid of many Unix dependencies so Perl on Win32 worked well). Whoever told you Perl was stable in the "we don't intend to change it sense"?
I don't know the other two but fro what I've heard:
Python --
Similar to Perl. Tighter syntax, slightly less flexable
Ruby --
Much better OO implementation much smaller library.
So Perl 6 should be way more flesable than either of the other 2. We have to wait another 4/6 apocylopses to see about the comparison of the object orientation.
This will make Perl an attractive contender for serious application development; something which it came reasonably close to in late Perl5 but didn't quite get there because while you could do most things in a consensually "proper" way, the roll-your-own methodology just wasn't convincing enough for pointy haired project managers.
The primary difference with Perl6 is that it will have full support for strict(ish) typing and object orientation which makes it suitable for large projects where it's impractical to expect programmer A to know anything about how programmer Z's module is implemented internally and vice versa.
The new feature set (together with Perl's availability on a wide range of platforms and the huge range of freely available interfaces on CPAN) means that Java and .NET will be facing some stiff competition in just about every conceivable application niche.
If the speed improvements are genuine then (assuming that one were in a position to choose) for probably the first time ever we will be in a position where there is hardly any real need to maintain skills in multiple languages as Perl will be at least adequate for the vast majority of implementations. It's not unreasonable to suppose the list of exclusions being limited to CPU bound code in high-performance content servers (eg RDBMS, HTTP) and real-time and embedded apps requiring hand-coded assembler or at least tightly optimised C.
Whether you agree with that or recoil in horror at the thought of your favourite language being marginalised, Perl is clearly not just a "glue" language any more. It's about to become a fully-fledged enterprise application development platform.
I'm sure you've already guessed, but for the record I am very much looking forward to this.
There is one fly in the ointment I guess. Perl, like C, is very free-form in terms of what it lets you do but the flip side of that coin is that such languages also let you write dangerously unstructured and unmaintainable code. They require good training and a degree of self discipline to use well. Self taught programmers who didn't have strict typing and nested scoping enforced on them at the beginning of their coding career almost inevitably tend to grow up writing code that is less secure and harder to read than do those who learned back in their college days to associate variable declaration at the wrong level of scope with lower assignment grades and some stern finger wagging from their tutor.
The new Perl will continue to make the impossible possible and the merely hard very easy, but for the first time it will provide support for a more formal structure where that is considered a good thing.
Remember though that Perl is still very much a grassroots phenomenon. Whether this hits anybody's radar screen out in the real world has to depend on how well and how rapidly it is taken up by the Perl community. i.e. upon the willingness of existing Perl code monkeys to grab the inevitable (presumably three-humped) Camel Book, learn the new features and use them deliberately to adopt a more structured and more scalable coding style.
It's on this point I think that Perl6 will succeed or fail. We will need plenty of real world examples out there so that new users have something from which to learn righteous coding principles, and so that sceptical project managers will see successful implentations from which to draw confidence and inspiration.
One problem with Perl, is that it's very hard to read somebody else's Perl code. Most Perl hackers can write scripts that do amazing things in much less space/time than a traditional compiled language, but their code is indecipherable to even other skilled Perl hackers. If you've ever maintained a large Perl program written by someone other than yourself, you know what I'm talking about.
Adding more features to the language will only make this problem worse. Very few Perl programmers know more than a fraction of Perl's syntax. More syntax means more stuff that your average Perl programmer doesn't understand! This is a huge impediment to writing a large project in Perl.
Languages like C and Java stay alive precisely because they're not very expressive. You can write huge behemoth-sized projects and still have some hope of maintaining them, because there just aren't that many ways to obfuscate the code.
Lots of nice features but such complexity and cleverness that even the people who use it don't like it.
IME, Ada is exceptionally well-liked by the people who know it (note: use != know). I've seen far fewer complaints about it from Ada programmers than I've seen from, e.g., C++ or Perl programmers about those languages.
ADA's a good language, but no one uses it.
Right, just like how no one uses Linux on the desktop.
But the real strength in perl 6 is that it's just about infinitely configurable. You can redefine the grammar to fit your needs or whims.
Yay lisp! er, I mean perl!
As far as i can tell, perl 6 is supposed to evoke four main reactions:
- Whoa.. It's Scheme, but I don't have to deal with the pervasive suffix notation and all those parenthesis!
- Whoa.. It's Smalltalk, but less heavy on the Everythings-A-Message pounding and without all those wierd hard brackets!
- Whoa.. It's K, but without the need to completely rethink how i program!
- Whoa.. It's Perl, but the object system isn't an eyesore and the reference system doesn't make your head explode!
Or, alternately:- Whoa.. It's a language with all the neat functional-flow-control bits of ML, but I don't actually have to write in ML!
- Whoa.. it's Objective C, but everything's an object, and no need to muck about with C types and baggage unless i really want to! or Whoa.. It's Java, but everything's an object, and there aren't any rules!
- Whoa.. It's APL, but without the need to completely rethink how i program and buy a new keyboard!
- Whoa.. It's a programming language I can trick into acting exactly like Java/LISP/ML/K/APL/Smalltalk/Ruby/Python/Prolog/C
# /Mercury, and still use the Perl string manipulation tools!
Really.. it steals from everyone. I think it's even kind of the point. Of course, maybe I'm completely confused and wrong and have inserted Perl 6 here; but, well, these were the reactions i hadIrritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Yesterday, Perl and Larry Wall came up in, believe it or not, a conversation I had with a friend regarding moviemaking. I had recently watched the director's commentary tracks on the DVDs of Rodriquez's "El Mariachi" and "Desperado", and I was explaining how impressed I was with his pragmatism. One of the most astonishing examples of this, to me, were his repeated admissions of complete disregard for certain kinds of continuity because "this is an action movie, things are happening very fast, and no one is going to notice it anyway." (That's a paraphrase.) He explained that he has x amount of time to get y amount of shots in a day's shooting, and worrying about details that no one is going to notice just doesn't make any sense.
Prior to watching these commentaries, I had rewatched Payne's "Election", which I think is a brilliant film, and after watching it I also watched it with the director's commentary. Payne is clearly a perfectionist, and he went to great lengths to preserve continuity and to create verisimilitude. (For example, two of his pet peeves in movies are cars without windshield mounted rear-view mirrors, and cars that are too clean.) I greatly admired Payne's attention to detail. Similarly, I greatly admire Kubrick's filmaking.
As the rare kind of guy who has both Knuth and Wall on my bookshelf behind me and who esteems both highly[1], and who appreciates both Rodriguez's pragmatic efficiency and Kubrick's auteur obsessiveness, I don't actually believe that there's the conflict there that other people assume there is. To me, it's a question of appropriateness. One approach is "correct" in one situation but "incorrect" in another.
To me, the very best filmmaker would know when to be like Rodriguez and when to be like Kubrick. Similarly, the best programmers would know when to be like Larry Wall and when to be like, say, Wirth. But that kind of versatility is rare. As is the case in so many things, human nature being what it is, most people have a preferred modality of thought and problem-solving, and operate in that mode whether it's effective or not. That's okay, providing that they somehow limit themselves to problems where their preferred method is appropriate. But many don't; and, worse, some proseltyze that their modality is what's "best" for everyone else, in every situation.
[1] Or, another supposed opposition: Tannenbaum and Torvalds. In their debate, Tannenbaum was the purist, Torvalds the pragmatist. If they were actually arguing about the same problem space, one of them would have had to be wrong and the other right. But they really weren't. I think that many of Tannenbaum's points about the superiority of microkernel architecture were correct and have been proven to be correct. On the other hand, you can't really argue with the success of Linux.
I agree most everything you wrote. I do think its worth adding something though: the organic vs. the constructed. Most languages start off constructed and they are:
....
a) highly consistent
b) easy to learn
c) very well fitted to the problem space
assuming the language is succesful the language gets applied to larger and larger problem areas and features get added that were originally considered in the design. The language moves towards becoming
a') inconsistent
b') complex
c') highly versitile over a wide range of problem spaces
If Perl were only still used mainly as a replacement for awk and sed it wouldn't be controversial. But over time Perl became a replacement for shell scripting and finally the "duct tape of computer science". To do this its added a tremendous number of libraries and these were developed independently of one another.
Since computer scientists are more reasearch oriented they tend to use "younger" tools; conversely people in the field are often using older tools for a variety of reasons.
___________
Finally one area I disagree with you is:
Ideally, there'd be a wide range of computing languages each perfectly and exquisitely engineered for their respective problem spaces. But, right now, computing isn't even close to being mature enough to support such a thing.
I actually think there are languages that are highly specialized for individual fields. In practice though the general purpose languages tend to be used much more often because these tools are too specialized. For example in math there are languages for:
-- number theory over finite fields
-- number theory over abstract fields
-- sparse matrix problems
-- crack based pde
-- ring theory
But in practice most people just Maple, Mathematica or Matlab because they don't want to have to learn a wide range of tools and these other languages are missing important features in other areas (like TeX export or GUIs).
Probably so...though a lot of this is because individual Perl programmers will each learn their preferred subset of Perl6, and will use it. Woe, woe unto the maintenance programmer who has learned a different dialect of Perl6! Woe unto the maintenance programmer when you have redefined the language syntax for your own convenience!
Easier to write, harder to read once written. Languages with a lot of syntax are the Dark Side of the Force.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
I attribute Ada's glorious failure to a few things, and none of them are the language itself:
- It was developed by the gov't. Nobody likes the gov't.
- The compilers are, like I said, really hard to write. So it took a long time for them to get implemented right, and there sure weren't any free (or even "affordable") ones for a long time.
- And the big one: no standard set of class libraries. No Java-like API, no STL, nothing. If you wanted a linked list you had to write it yourself. The Java API is half the reason that Java is so great to work with, and IMO has a lot to do with the language's success.
I really liked programming in Ada. I hated it at first (coming from being a C hacker in college) but in hindsight, it's the only language I've used that left me a better programmer.wordclock records