Run Perl 6 Today: Pugs 6.0.11 released

autrijus writes "I am delighted to announce that Pugs 6.0.11 is released, with experimental pugscc support to turn Perl 6 programs into stand-alone executables, as well as many new features. Pugs is an implementation of Perl 6, written in Haskell. For more information, see Pugs Apocryphon 1 and this perl.com interview."

Comments

Excellent

[eyeye]

I have been following this with interest. My only concern about this excellent project however is if using Haskell limits the potential developer base that might contribute.

Re:Excellent

[chromatic]

It may seem odd, but Pugs has actually inspired several developers to learn Haskell.

Re:Excellent

[smittyoneeach]

Is there any research showing whether this "generally accepted" performance hit is intrinsic to languages with fat run-time environments, or does it have more to do with the nature of functional languages?

Re:Excellent

[Chalst]

I don't know of any convincing evidence in that direction with respect to normal programming styles, but Siskind's Stalin compiler is a high-level (ie. its source language is scheme R4RS) compiler that performs extremely well when given code hand-optimised to make use of the compiler's brutally effective optimiser. To make the point, Siskind rewrote several standard UNIX utilities in Stalin and benchmarkes their performance: his code ran in about 25% of the time of those in the standard BSD distribution of the time.

is Perl 6 already standardised?

[CaptainPinko]

I mean is there already a full specification for the language? If so what are people waiting for, Parrot?

Re:is Perl 6 already standardised?

[CaptainPinko]

Has Perl 6 been specified?

By December 2004, most of Perl 6 has been specified as a series of Synopses. Although not considered final, it is now stable enough to be implemented. Many of the Synopses are based on Larry's Apocalypses. Sometimes the design team releases Exegeses, which explain the meaning of Apocalypses. Pugs adheres to the Synopses, referring to Apocalypses or Exegeses when a Synopsis is unclear or imprecise.

---

Still doesn't answer what the Perl6 folks are waiting for...

Re:is Perl 6 already standardised?

[autrijus]

Yes it is a major challange. :)

There are several projects underway to migrate existing Perl 5 code to Perl 6 and Parrot, so no-one will be forced to give up Perl 5 and CPAN when it arrives. Indeed, were it not for CPAN, I think many people (me included) would stay around to work with Perl 6.

As to fresh mindshare, Perl 6's optional strong typing and cleaner OO semantics does draw new people to join. It is also worth noting that Perl 6 has fewer precedence levels then Perl 5, and the operators are more streamlined as well.

Re:is Perl 6 already standardised?

[autrijus]

Perl 6 is waiting mainly on a Perl6 to Parrot AST compiler, and the Parrot AST itself. See this draft milestones document for details.

Christ

[Laxitive]

An implementation of Perl 6.. in Haskell?

There is something that feels.. oddly.. wrong about that. I can't put my finger on it.

It's kind of like the feeling I got when I watched a porno with a hot girl and a really hairy guy.

Hrm... I'll have to download this.

-Laxitive

Re:Christ

[tdemark]

It's kind of like the feeling I got when I watched a porno with a hot girl and a really hairy guy.

Please don't compare Perl 6 and Ron Jeremy. I think Ron would be insulted.

Re:Christ

[KILNA]

It's amazing that something so ugly can be so well endowed, and do such beautiful things. So where, exactly, does the analogy break down?

Re:Christ

[MaxQuordlepleen]

Interestingly, this Perl-as-Uncle-Ron parallel seems to run on and on. Uncle Ron keeps trying to break into the "mainstream" and find "mass acceptance", and while he has done so in limited roles that play to his special strengths, at the end of the day he is a superstar of porn but a pretty sorry legitimate actor.

Re:Christ

[KILNA]

When you're watching Ron in action, or reading Perl... it can be difficult to make out what's going on. It's often hairy, confusing, and messy. In the end, though it may not have been pretty, they get the job done and produce results.

Ron has more humps than a pack of camels, perhaps he sould be the mascot for Perl 6.

Re:Christ

[Goldberg's Pants]

You're forgetting the fact he can also suck his own dick. Seriously, I've seen him do it. It's tough for him, what with his build, but there's definite tongue-dick connection.

Enjoy your nightmares.

Developers Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pugs implementation effort is test-driven. In many cases, a few hours pass between the arrival of a new test and the implementation of a feature. So, anyone who knows (or would like to try) Perl 6 can contribute tests to Pugs. No knowledge of Haskell is required at all.

perl6 is a mistake

[keesh]

I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, Perl 5 is an extremely good language for quick scripting things. That's what it was designed for. Sure, you can do big projects in it, but it's not exactly ideal. Recently I've started using Ruby as well, and I intend to move my department over to it instead of wasting time with Perl 6.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. It's like Ada all over again! The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[BinLadenMyHero]

I understand your points, but that doesn't necessarely mean the death of Perl. People can stick to Perl 5, just as they did with Winamp 2 when the ugly Winamp 3 came out.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, you never liked Perl all that much in the first place. I honestly don't see what's wrong with variables that include $, %, and @. It's just a way of concisely throwing in some syntactic markers to allow you to have interesting and convenient syntax in other areas. Certainly other languages have similar things; for instance, C has an array dereference operator ("[" and "]"), and nobody complains about it, even though it really is basically the same concept. And then there's the "." operator for selection of members of structs. Again, basically the exact same type of thing, and nobody has a problem with it because they're very familiar with it already.

But I guess what it boils down to is whether it is, in fact, better to have a "nice, clean, pure language". I would argue that it isn't. I don't have a nice, clean pure car. My car's engine is water cooled. That makes it more complicated and less reliable, but it also makes it more efficient. Also, the back brakes are of a different design than the front brakes. Again, it would be purer and cleaner and simpler to make them identical, since that would make it easier to understand them and work on them, but it's more efficient the way it is. And, while I'm at it, my body's metabolism involves the burning of oxygen, when in reality an anaerobic metabolism is much cleaner and simpler (and safer -- do you know how corrosive oxygen is? there's a reason behind health fanatics' taking massive doses of antioxidants). But again, the Kreb's cycle, despite being a very complicated process, is actually waaaay more efficient. So I think sometimes a more complex, less pure, less clean design can be a better design.

Having said all that, Perl is easy and fun to learn if you're into the weird and wonderful ideas behind it. But, like progressive rock music, if you're not into it, it's just irritating and seems virtually impossible to learn. So perl is great on programmer efficiency because it can allow a programmer to get massive amounts of stuff done easily. But on the other hand, it's also quite bad for programmer efficiency because some people just don't get into the ideas behind it and thus find it excruciatingly hard to learn and use.

By the way, one of the really dandy things, IMHO, about Perl 6 is this idea that every damned thing is a closure. Loop bodies are closures, even, if I remember correctly. This is really freaky and wonderful, but maybe just because once you learn about closures, you get addicted to them. Also, by the way, my own personal impression of Perl 6 is that it is actually making the language simpler and cleaner. At least, the everything-we-can-make-a-closure-is-a-closure idea gives me a feeling that some underlying things are being unified in a nice way. I started to wonder, actually, why every language doesn't do it that way, and I haven't come up with an answer yet, other than the idea that maybe it can't be compiled into efficient machine code.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem, though. There's no such thing as "standard" tabs.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[j0nkatz]

Correct and now Winamp is no longer around. It's development is dead. You just proved his point.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

You can in fact do this with plain old Perl 5 regexes, as follows - to quote from Jeffrey Friedl's excellent Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition, p. 328-331:

my $LevelN;
$LevelN = qr/ \(( [^()] | (??{ $LevelN }) )* \) /x;

This dynamic regex matches text within an arbitrarily-nested set of nested parentheses, by recursively 'calling' the compiled regex $LevelN from within itself - the left hand condition of the alternation is the exit condition. It works in Perl 5.6 or higher, maybe even earlier - just tested it.

Of course, Perl 6 makes this sort of thing much easier and has a built-in Parse::RecDescent feature within regexes, but the overall complexity of the language is quite scary. I'm looking at OCaml, which is higher level than Perl (though with some features in modules and less syntactic sugar) and almost as fast as C/C++. It's also functional and OO, more details on my OCaml page

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[darnok]

I agree with your sentiments entirely.

I've been using Perl since the mid-90s; I can clearly recall the Perl 4 days, and I've written some reasonably sizeable systems with Perl 5.

That said, I'm also looking at switching my people from Perl to either Ruby or Python.

Things I love about Perl that I'll be sorry to walk away from:
- CPAN; an amazing resource
- for 100 line scripts, the ability to code as quickly as I can type, with few errors when I try to run for the first time
- Perl's ability to bolt stuff together that was never meant to be bolted together
- DBI model; it's so simple and elegant
- regular expressions; don't know why, but Perl's regex's seem to be more natural than any other language's equivalent

Things I'll be glad to put behind me:
- how easy it is to write unsupportable code with Perl. I've lost count of how many times I've had to get people to rewrite working Perl code to make it comprehensible
- the OO model; it's a bad bolt-on at best
- "sacred code" (see two points above). Several times, I've come across "sacred code" written in Perl. It works now, but every time anyone tries to alter it, it breaks in unexpected ways. Yep, I/we could walk through it with the debugger to work out how it does its magic; nope, it often takes so long that you're better to take the hit and rewrite from scratch
- TMTOWTDI. As a concept, it's fine, but being able to code the same small piece of functionality in 143 ways using 37 different functions kills supportability
- the books. I don't know how many Perl books there are, but only a small percentage seem to push any sort of sensible approach to coding in the large. Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl" is a gem; a truly great coding book that shows people how to write scalable maintainable Perl. Many others seem to focus on cool ways to solve a small problem in very few lines of code, which gives readers the impression that this is actually a desirable way for coders to code

I'll keep an eye on Perl 6, but I suspect it'll break a lot of CPAN libraries. If so, then the most compelling reason to use Perl will disappear with it.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[Rayder]

Being a lover of smalltalk, yes, Ruby is really nice, but lacks the passion (and orthogonality) I found in Smalltalk where every day you get surprised by something new you didn't know or by looking at how clever the architecture is.

Recently I've discovered Perl (after beign bored with Ruby), and I'm amazed, it has a steepy learning curve, but every day I learn new ways to do things in a more compact (but illegible for the untrained eye) and smart way possible. And the infinite wisdom you can find in CPAN.

For me Perl is as fun as Smalltalk was.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, I'm also looking at switching my people from Perl to either Ruby or Python.

If you use Parrot implementations of Ruby or Python in the future, you'll be able to freely mix Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Tcl, et al. Which means that:

Things I love about Perl that I'll be sorry to walk away from:
- CPAN; an amazing resource

You will have access to any CPAN module from any supported language using your language of choice native syntax.

- for 100 line scripts, the ability to code as quickly as I can type, with few errors when I try to run for the first time

You will be able to write those pieces in Perl 5 or Perl 6 without losing any interoperability with other supported languages.

- Perl's ability to bolt stuff together that was never meant to be bolted together

You will be able to use Perl 5 or Perl 6 for that, or other languages in case Parrot itself inherits said ability to your satisfaction.

- DBI model; it's so simple and elegant

Using Parrot implementation of Python, you will be able to write:

dbh = Perl.DBI.connect("dbi:Pg:dbname=yourdb", "user", "pass")

and have a Perl object referenced by your Python variable, with correct DBI semantics but with native Python syntax.

- regular expressions; don't know why, but Perl's regex's seem to be more natural than any other language's equivalent

Perl 5 regular expressions, as well as Perl 6 rules, will be both available directly in Parrot.

I am a die-hard Perl guy, I will use Perl 6, but I am glad that no one will have to use it to cooperate with me. You will be able to write in Python, someone else in Ruby, another guy in Perl 5 and me in Perl 6, and still we'll be able to write our own CPAN module together and everyone will be able to use it not even thinking about the languages it was written in. This is something like .NET, only it will work and will be Free.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[yarbo]

you've never made this mistake in C/C++?

while (condition);
{
do_stuff();
}

or this one

for (...)
statement1;
statement2;

those mistakes can't happen in Python. A whole class of bugs eliminated, and all you have to do is indent your code (you don't do that anyway?!)

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[IpalindromeI]

Ignore this troll. This post shows up in every Perl 6 article.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[smittyoneeach]

If you use tabs consistently for indentation

Repeat after me:Tabs Are Evil

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[yarbo]

That would mean it has a shallow learning curve. If it was steep, you would learn everything in a short period of time.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[yarbo]

I've worked with people, and found that trying to force indent on them is very hard, for some reason. Forcing splint on a partner I had for a project was impossible (hell, he even started disabling some of the warnings, but that's another story).

Indent will fix the indentation, but who is going to compare the before and after to see if something visibly changed scope?

Besides, Python will let you write complicated things on a single line, provided that you don't use nested loops or assignments in conditionals. You can separate single statements on a single line with semicolons.

If you're worried about mixing tabs and spaces, you can run python -tt and it'll throw an exception if tabs and spaces are mixed at any point.

Btw, I think that picking unit tests that cover every line of code in all circumstances can be hard, and not everyone can be expected to write code that'll detect scope errors like the ones I listed. Sometimes those bugs will slip, and I think languages that enforce indentation are doing the right thing. There may be wonderful optional programs and unit testing packages, but many users can't be bothered, and it's nice if a language can force certain people to do things the right way.

Maybe I'm just bitter because no one I work with will bother incrementally testing, unit testing, running lint, or following indentation standards if not forced. Maybe most people don't need it, I just know people around me need it...

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[yarbo]

But in Python, you CAN put a statement on the same line as a conditional, but you're limited to one liners (which can be more than one statement).
you can write 'if y:x'
or you can write 'if y:x;x;x;x;x;x;'

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[autrijus]

I would not have worked on Perl 6 if it will break my 111 CPAN modules. So yes, we'll find a way to run CPAN.

Perl 6 also eliminated a large amount of @{[]} unreadable code -- see Pugs's modules/ and ext/ directory for examples that may be compared directly with equivalent Perl 5 modules.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[ahdeoz]

And when world communism is finally implemented for real, there will be no poor or hungry on unhappy or unhealthy and anything that doesn't accomplish all this isn't really communism.

Re:perl6 is a mistake

[ajs]

"I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, Perl 5 is an extremely good language for quick scripting things."

First off, let's drop the word "script". It has no place in informed conversation, as it has no formal definition. Originaly the term meant logic-free execution of what would otherwise be command-line operations. Later, shells became capable of logic, so that definition wandered to include any run-time interpreted, high-level code which used existing programs to do its work. Then Perl came along and changed everything. Perl is non run-time interpreted, but it still feels "scriptish" in the sense that it is aware of the system its working with and makes its tools available to you.

Now languages exist across the spectrum from Perl to Ruby to Scheme to Java. They can all be called "scripting" languages if you want, but the term has lost its meaning. It's just a word that you use to refer to a language that you personally don't take seriously.

"Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it."

I liked the way Perl approached OO. It was a decidedly tentative approach. Where many languages added OO features by emulating C++ (the OO lingua franca of the early 90s), Perl didn't buy into that. It simply added all of the features that you would need to BUILD an OO system, but provided no object system, high-level OO abstractions, core library support, etc.

Now that choice is paying off. Perl 6 can look back acrosss the last 10 years and see all the ways that Perl's OO tools were used, and select the most successful strategies to codify into the language. Perl 6 is also pulling from other languages where their features have proven useful. So, for example, Ruby mixins work quite well, and Perl 6 will adapt into its object model.

"Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge;"

You clearly don't know Perl 6. The object system is a complete re-design and resembles a blend of some Perl 5 best practices, Ruby, and Smalltalk. It's NOT a pile of kludges at all (unless, as with "script", you'd simply like to continue using what you consider a derogitory word without any basis in fact).

"I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much)."

If whitespace scares you, you are doing yourself a disservice. I'm not terribly fond of Python, but it's not because of the whitespace thing. That was just difficult to get over at first, but we've all been writing pseudo-code using whitespace for blocking for decades, so it's not THAT hard to get used to.

"The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example)"

Well, for starters, there's no such thing as a "keys array" in either Perl 5 or Perl 6. You treat the return value of the keys method as an array in Perl 6, but to think of them as an array up-front is incorrect. That's probably the source of your confusion right there. You can do this in Perl 6:

$nkeys=%hash<subhash>.size

I'm sure you'll agree that that's not to hard to remember.

"and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character"

If you find @, $, % hard to type, then I'm not sure I can help you. You did say you'd been programming in Perl since the pink camel?

"Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess."

Here you're way off base. Perl 5 supports about a dozen data-types, but the most often used are:

• scalar

Re:What happened to Parrot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Perl6 had a language-independant runtime called Parrot. What happened to that?

They're still working on it, and it looks like it's going to be pretty impressive when it's done. But they're writing it in C, which is great for fast code but very bad for rapid development. This is written in Haskell, and therefore has the opposite characteristics: the interpreter is apparently about 100 times slower than Perl5, but on the other hand they developed a working interpreter from scratch in one week.

This isn't meant to replace Parrot, it's meant to provide an alternative implementation that can be used to work on things like Perl6 libraries so they'll be ready when the "real thing" finally appears.

perl6 is not a mistake

[Yobgod Ababua]

Well, I can tell you have some pretty strong feelings on this subject. I'd just like to add a few comments from my perspective as another long time Perl user...

Let me start by saying that I've read all of the perl6 documents with great interest and have almost universally been pleased with the changes that are being made. In all cases, I appreciate how most of the decisions are being made and that the concepts of useability and clarity are taken as important overarching goals. As an example, if you actually read apoc 5 which you linked to as an example of "smoking crack", you'll see that one of the main goals is "better huffman coding" - ie: making frequent tasks easier to express than infrequent tasks and that another is to make regular expressions more readable and maintainable and less like line noise. These, to me, are eminantly admirable goals in a scripting language.

On OO, Note that Perl6, unlike Perl5, is being rewritten with OO at its core, not as an expansion to the previous "nasty hack".
Note also that the perl6 team shares many of your issues with perl5's OO implementation and wants perl6 to be better: Apocalypse 12.

Similarly, when you complain about $,@,% and how confusing they are, you seem to be complaining about perl5isms that perl6 is dedicated to addressing...

In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length. In your specific case, because the hash in inside another hash, you're looking at something like (keys $hash{"key"}).length; ... which doesn't seem particularly brain melting to me, especially compared to perl5. I also don't see this threatened horde of new datatypes you seem so angry about. I really recommend that people interested in what these differences will bring read the Exegesises, where equivalent perl5 and perl6 code is usually compared.

"const int $var = 27;" ? Did you mean something like "my int $var is constant = 27;"? What specifically do you mean when you say that it isn't entirely constant or entirely an integer, and why does it matter?

I completely have no understanding of why perl6 would please "the managers" or what this "one thing that makes perl5 special" is that you think is being lost. As far as I can tell, perl6 keeps everything that I thought made perl5 special and aims to clean up many of the things that make it a PITA.

"It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess." Isn't that why perl6 is a complete rewrite? What unholy mess are you referring to? From your post, I don't believe that you're one to be swayed from your beliefs, but many of your arguments appear on the surface to be based more on emotional response than factual backing...

Re:perl6 is not a mistake

[Black Perl]

In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length.

Wouldn't it be nicer if you could do

%hash.keys.length

..or would that be too much sens^H^H^H^H like Ruby?

Re:perl6 is not a mistake

[autrijus]

%hash.keys of course works, in the Rubyish fashion. It does work in Pugs now, too. :)

perl patterns can match context sensitive grammars

[sleepingsquirrel]

Well, at least some of them.

From a Free Software Developer

[Prien715]

I created a small Win32 project in Perl for my previous job (which I still maintain on occasion) to help IT people manage groups of machines more effectively (by storing hardware/software/license key information in a central MySQL database using an extremely simple but powerful program. If anyone's interested, the project homepage is here).

I tried to use freely available software to create my program, but I didn't want have to install Perl on all the machines. So, I used a IndigoStar's Perl2Exe to convert the script and some dependent .exes to a single stand-alone exe. I see that GHC has support for the same ability according to the article. I was curious what practical experience anyone had using it on the Win32 platform and how its feature set/compatibility compares to Perl2exe.

Re:From a Free Software Developer

[umgah]

I tried out an evaluation version of Perl2Exe, and found that it worked nicely. However, since then I've switched to pp for converting scripts into executables. It's available under the Artistic License.

Re:From a Free Software Developer

[autrijus]

Thanks for using PAR/pp. Incidentally, it is developed by the same person as Pugs. :-)

Re:From a Free Software Developer

[Prien715]

The link's broken, but I'll have to take a look at it once I have time. I've been developing with the full version, and while the code is still runable (and I test it) in script form, I rely on lots of perl2exe's abilities (like being able to bundle other files into the perl2exe executable). Thanks for the information though! I'll definitely check it out at some point.

Re:From a Free Software Developer

[autrijus]

The canonical link for PAR, is http://par.perl.org/. And yes, our feature set is largely a superset over perl2exe and perlapp's.

Re:From a Free Software Developer

[umgah]

Hehe...I didn't notice your username on the original post. Thanks for providing such a useful tool.

Re:Gotta love FOSS

[FidelCatsro]

4) satisfaction for giving something to the community
5) offerd high paying development job due to portfolio
6) profit

It's amazing how productive Autrijus is

[Anonymous Coward]

Autrijus has accomplished more for Perl6 in one month of development than the two dozen people working on Parrot did in the past 3 years. It certainly proves that one individual can be 100 times as productive as their peers in the programming field. The big difference appears to be that Autrijus actually has a plan and a logical design. I do find it puzzling that the initial Perl6 interpreter is not being written in Perl5, though. Obviously speed is not a concern at this stage - only correctness. One hundred times as many developers know Perl5 than do Haskell. But, who can complain - Autrijus gets results. Eventually he plans to recode the P6 interpreter in P6 anyway. At his current pace perhaps it will only be in a month or two.

Re:It's amazing how productive Autrijus is

[autrijus]

Thank-you for your kind words and support... I really appreciate it. However, there is a few point I'd like to clarify:

• Pugs and Parrot complement each other. Pugs is a parser, evaluator and eventually compiler of the Perl 6 language, and Parrot is a virtual machine for a compiler to target. As they are totally different things, the time taken to implement them could probably not be directly measured or compared.
• Haskell is an excellent language to implement parsers and compilers. If I were to use Perl 5 to implement Pugs, it would take much more time and result in far more lines of code, which would probably hinder people's help -- it takes only a few hours to learn Haskell in order to hack Pugs, so I do not consider a major entry barrier.
• That said, Perl 6 will become a much more language to write parsers and compilers in, so the eventual rewrite in Perl 6 should be much easier than implementing it in Perl 5.
• The Perl 6 interpreter will not be recoded in Perl 6 -- the compiler will. :-)

Re:It's amazing how productive Autrijus is

[BlackSoul]

The Perl 6 interpreter will not be recoded in Perl 6 -- the compiler will. :-)

This is why I enjoy Perl so much! When you can compile a language, with a compiler written in said language, you have something great. :o)

Re:What happened to Parrot?

[Anonymous Coward]

This link explains the issues facing Parrot.

tabs

[cakoose]

Tabs are not that bad; you just have to be more careful. If you can handle tabs consistently, then tabs are fine. (I happen to use spaces because I've gotten used to it, but spaces do have their disadvantages...)

OO at its core?

[sam_vilain]

Well, I'm not sure that it's entirely accurate to say that Perl 6 has objects at its core. That is because the concept of "core" is itself only a loosely defined concept.

The fact that the object system is defined in S12 shows that they are not exactly "core" to the language, but they are definitely deeply ingrained, and widely employed. And consistent. And inflectable. And flexible. And not conforming to rigid ideas about what they should be.

Yes, this is the point where you should get worried. Some guy has just started rambling vaguely about benefits of a system that is still very much vapourware, and promises so much that you have to wonder how it will *ever* be implemented, let alone be implemented in such a fashion that we will ever get to the point where a single Perl command might end up as a single CPU cycle.

What I've seen so far has led me to think that it might just be possible, so I have to satisfy my curiosity...