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perl6 and Parrot 0.5.2 Released
mAriuZ writes "Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we've bundled Patrick Michaud's Rakudo (thats the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next months release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress. The second new feature is a toolkit for starting your own compiler. Max Mohun built a prototype several months ago, and we've added a stripped-down version for now that builds the skeleton of a compiler for you using the Parrot Compiler Tools. I mentioned the LOLCODE compiler in What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on Their Christmas Vacation; this is how Simon and Company were able to get LOLCODE up and running so quickly."
Actually, evolution developed the camel and the horse for different environments, but that is not really the issue.
PERL6, like those before it, is just a tool. It will either work or not. Some don't like PERL because it can be messy and perhaps unstructured. I submit to you that some coders can make a mess of any language. PERL has its advantages, and like everything else, its disadvantages.
I too will use PERL6, no matter what name it is given. I find PERL is quite useful, and I presume that many others do also as it still seems to be relevant to all but the prophets of the latest Web2.0 gizzmo language thingies.
In any case, a hammer is a hammer, and when you have to drive some nails... well, damnit, use a hammer.
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This is probably just flame bait, but here's your answer.
Python is overly simplistic, making it difficult to do certain types of interesting programming.
This is by design, Python is meant to be dumbed down (in the sense that Java is) and have a clean small footprint.
Ruby is slow, even by scripting language standards (in the main implementation, anyways).
This is by design (well ok, not really), but Ruby needs to support all those gorgeous abstraction layers somehow.
Both of them aren't that amazing when it comes to Unicode (like Perl or Java), don't have built in security-hardened modes (like Perl's tainting or PHP's weird data firewall thingy, etc), aren't as portable as they might be (like EBCDIC, VMS, S390 and other places that aren't Unix or Windows) and their package repositories lack sophistication and the ability to properly nest dependencies in a cross-platform way (like Perl, Fortran, R and Erlang).
So by all means, if you have simple programming needs on lowest-common-denominator environments doing ordinary things and you don't stretch far beyond the core libraries, by all means go with a language that fits your brain the best, be it Perl, Python, Ruby, Brainfuck, whatever.
If you want to integrate with C code inside the rendering pipeline of a movie render farm while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python.
I'm still not sure of anywhere that Ruby is a standout success... Rails has jumped the shark and is in decline, and I'm not aware of any major use cases...
Perl is still a brilliant language to get the simple things done really really fast but tieing together half a dozen CPAN modules, while still having the ability to scale your code base up a hell of a long way, and the knowledge that it's fairly easy to write highly portable code.
"...while having code so boring anyone can maintain it..."
I hope that I understand that wrong and that you don't consider unintelligible, unmaintainable, code 'interesting' in a good sense.
Because my mama taught me to comb my hair, keep my fingernails clean and write code that other humans can understand without wanting to couge their eyes out with a fork.
Working lambdas (especially closures), for one.
How ironic that you praise Scheme's design in this context. The ambiguous parsing of vertical whitespace leads directly to the broken lambda problem. Now that's probably fine for a teaching language, but plenty of people seem to think that Python is a language that scales up for experts. If that's the case, perhaps it's appropriate to judge the design of Python in terms of how it supports important features on which to build larger and more elegant abstractions.
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> 2. Did it take too long?
> Perl 6 received a fair amount of hype when the project began. With no realistic timetable
> publicly announced, it seems that people forgot or gave up on it. In fact, in that time
> Python has become very popular; I wonder if it has taken some of the 'market share' that
> would have otherwise gone to Perl 6.
I tend to think Perl 6 as a completely new language, rather than a new version of an old language. If you have even the concatenation operation changed from "." to "_", and if array indexing that you had written as "$arr[$i]$" now must look like "@arr[$i]" instead, and if you'd lose RAII on the way because garbage collection is now no longer at predictable time, it mean all programs will have to be significantly modified or at least converted. This is not exactly what I'd expect from a new version.
As a new language, it emerge probably slower than what most of us hope, but is probably not as slow as most of us perceived. After all, Perl 6 is a very ambitious language that have all features of Perl 5 and quite a bit more, and it has a completely new low-level engine as well. That slowness is probably due to the lack of any people dedicated to its implementation until very recently.
By the way, Python is not new. The first version of Python is released in approximately the same time as the first version of Perl. Python is first conceived in the 80's, first implementation started being written late 1989, completed 1991, and did not gain general acceptance until 2000. FYI, Perl 6 is conceived in 2000, Pugs starts to be implemented in early 2005, although it is still quite rudimentary.
That's not really very helpful. I still feel like an expat perl programmer but I have rails/nginx sites that see over 100,000 people a day without any difficulty. They're clustered over four servers, none of which peaks at more than a half of its capacity. Five years ago I was running similarly busy sites under mod_perl and apache 1.3.x. The architecture was more powerful but less robust. I could do much all sorts of interesting things with the apache lifecycle - rails feels like lego by comparison - but the whole assembly was flaky and temperamental, each mod_perl process took up to 50MB and I lived in constant fear of the whole thing falling over.
That probably has as much to do with my code quality as anything else (and the 'interesting things') but it does show that the modern high level frameworks are a viable alternative. Rails doesn't scale well but it does cluster well, and hardware is cheap. I miss the quality of people you get in the perl community, the quality of documentation (out here they think that having a blog counts) and the cheerful absurdism. I don't miss the posturing and strop, and in terms of getting things done I'm much better off than I was.