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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."
hai
can has stdio?
visible "frist p0st!!"
kthxbye
btw damn you lameness filter!
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Yeah, or you could choose a factor that's not completely irrelevant when you're looking for the next language to learn.
Beautiful plumage...
LOLWHAT?
Eleven months early!
Be heard || Be herd
what about the fact that in order to use python you have to taint yourself with the language created by Knuth?
Nice troll. As a free-software supporting atheist, I can't think of a much more obnoxious mockery of those ideals than your post.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
In the time it took to develop Perl 6, other programming languages have been conceived, implemented, used and abandoned.
While I am relieved that Perl 6 is finally showing signs of life, I have concerns:
1. Can Perl 6 take the place of Perl 5?
Perl 5 is integral to Unix/Linux systems; it is pretty much taken for granted. To switch to Perl 6 seems like a monumental task. It seems more likely that those wishing to use Perl 6 will have it installed along with Perl 5 (not instead of).
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.
3. Is it any good?
Perl 6 was supposed to be the "community's" rewrite of Perl 5. The word 'community', when it comes to programming language design, is a bit concerning.... It almost sounds like a euphemism for 'committee'. And that makes me shudder. I once heard the expression "A camel is a horse designed by committee." And I can think of a few programming languages that go along with that saying (No offense to camels).
Either way, I will download it. I will use it. I will see if it's any good. And, despite all of the issues, I am glad it's finally here!
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
because we aspire to be better than those we disagree with
Said the person posting to a Slash based website.
That's why I only use nil, though I switch to SARTRE or Whitespace in my more philosophical moods. Anyway, you're missing out, I heard there's a bunch of code in the Bible or something.
This is not the release of Perl 6, this is merely another release on the branch that will one day become the perl6 release. The interesting change is that you can now build a proper binary version of perl.
Thanks for the mild chuckle
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Does Parrot work like the .Net framework in the sense that libraries say writen in Perl can be used in Python or Tcl!
(note that Tcl is a completly different paradigm than Perl or Python)
.Net to achieve this it forces languages to implement certain set of features, and that the libraries to be shareable to be written using a subset of the CLI or CLR. Are there any Parrot plans for something similar, the idea of a single Libarary archive for all the free languages out there sounds amazing. Groovy is doing something exactly this with Java.
I do know that for
Anyway, I read the faq and this seems unlikely to be planned for, but maybe someone else knows better!
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.
I think you're saying it's ironic I'd have that attitude on a web site that is run on Perl. Correct? That just proves my point. Slashdot was created in 1997. This is legacy code. If it were built today it would not be with Perl. Look at Digg. I want somebody to tell me why they think Perl is relevant for new projects today.
Thank you very much. That's what I wanted to read. I agree with you on RoR. I think it's not quite as billed. My problem with Perl is reading it. I can't stand it. Really. I'm learning Smalltalk and I can't go to Perl after that. For now it's just shell scripts/sed/awk. Cheers.
I use Test::More and other Perl test automation tools extensively at work. I recently wanted to make a web front end for the testing reports. I already had test results parsers written as Perl modules for the command line test analyzers, so I just used Perl to make the test report pages with CGI.
It's not always the right choice, but it can still be very useful.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
You are the obnoxious one. The world does not revolve around you. No one cares that you follow the cult of Stallman. I use Linux also (Oh no, I didn't say "GNU/Linux!"), but I don't try to force others to. Like it or not, .NET exists and people may actually speak about it here.
Since you're so into the FOSS movement, why don't you stop contradicting that "freedom" by insulting people who talk about other platforms?
"...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.
This isn't reddit - some of use have jobs and use Perl to make those jobs easier. We can't afford the language of the month fads that pervade that other site.
Uh...Slashdot just rewrote its interface and much of its code base a few months ago. Not exactly legacy.
Whooh, Slashdot switches to CSS. That really counts as an overhaul!
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved. If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer ;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give .NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others ;-).
Very sorry for double posting, but I checked the wrong formatting box on the previous post.
;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
.NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others ;-).
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved.
If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give
man...this is gonna be awesome! Kudos to everyone who's contributing to making my preferred language so much better! Live long and Perl on!
http://www.gibby.net.au
Ahhh, put that in your sig and smoke it!!!
The supposed "community" rewrite started with a bunch of actual community requests, which Larry Wall then waded through increasingly slowly, pretty much taking the little bits he liked, then proceeded to add on a huge set of requirements that he cared about personally (and to be fair, probably the core Perl devs too). Things like extending regex into a full grammar that could parse Perl and be used to extend the language. And linguistic and abstract gumbo like how regular control flow (returning for a fucntion) was some specialization of the exception mechanism.
Dont get me wrong, I loved reading the Apocalypses. I thought, "wow, Larry really has a deep vision of where he wants things to go". I thought is was pretty neat and hoped to play with it. But in my mind I was thinking that Perl 6 would keep to the general strengths of Perl, in that it was FAST to get done what you wanted.
That was YEARS ago. I'm abstractly interested but have no desire to use Perl anymore. The "community" rewrite was sprinkled with requests that addressed what people were actually trying to do (certainly NOT trying to parse Perl, NOT taking 6 years, and NOT trying to get a VM running), they were a hodgepodge but every submission was pretty much focused on a narrow problem and in themselves would be achievable in less than 6 years. Instead it's become Larry's Odyssey. I also no longer harbor any expectation that Perl 6 will be FAST (to learn incrementally, to develop a quick solution, or to execute). Great if it does, I just don't believe or care.
I wish Perl 6 had been the 'shortsighted' approval of perhaps a quarter or a third of the RFCs, rolled out within a year or two. Maybe Perl 7 could have continued this stupid trajectory it's on to irrelevance. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features.
This wasn't what it should have been. It is like this because Perl 6 was overrun by Larry's priorities instead of the community's.
I'm not sure why anybody is up in arms about a Perl6 release date. It takes a long time to get done. That's the way the world works. This isn't a platform with a fixed set of requirements, a predictable user base, and limited scalability requirements.
People have been arguing for who knows how long about syntax. At some point the argument has to end and someone has to implement that syntax. It's not an easy thing to bring either of these points to conclusion.
Parrot is register based, not stack based. Perl has been developed using Haskell, and eventually it will come to the point where perl can be compiled with itself. These are monumental tasks for volunteer workers pursuing some pretty hefty goals for the sake of pursuing them.
Pugs has been working for quite some time already, and its an easy transition for anybody already familiar with perl.
I can see criticizing the project because it's hard for a newbie to figure out how to help, or criticizing the syntax in favor of ruby/python/etc, or criticizing performance (although both Perl6 and Parrot perform very well IMO), but criticizing the time it has taken to build? Get off your high horse and go build your next big Web 2.0 script that can do anything as long as you have less than 100 daily visitors.
Lol, why is parent -1 Flamebait? He should be funny.
I'm a tree-hugging, religion-hating, free software-supporting atheist, but the reason why I don't use Perl is not that Larry Wall is a Christian. It's that I want to keep my sanity.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Agreed, that one gave me a good laugh as I read it. :-) I don't know *what* the author meant exactly, but it sounds like I'd prefer the "boring" code over the "interesting" Perl code in case I'm going to be the new maintainer of a software project.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"interesting programming" --- You call line noise "interesting programming"? Name one thing that's not insanely unmaintainable and therefore useless that you can do on Perl and cannot on Python.
Python is not dumbed down, it's simplified. The introduction of R6RS (Scheme) contains the best insight I could ever find on the design of languages (and software in general): "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.". Python does this better.
Ruby slow? Who gives a damn? Faster processors or larger farms are cheaper than man hours, so if it's more productive than, say, Java (and pretty much anything that's not assembly would be), then it's well worth it. The problem with Ruby is that it's fugly and doesn't follow the above mentioned principle, and that it has sub-par Unicode support (then again, PHP does too), not that it's slow.
And Python has good Unicode support, what are you talking about?
Also, if you consider PHP's misfeature of magic quotes (or who knows what else), you need to relearn the definition of security.
Python runs even on frigging PSPs. I call that portable.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
April 1st already ?
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Python's lambda is limited to a single expression, which sucks, but you can always do def _(...) just before use. As for closures, Python implements closures properly (properly = as described in SICP, the environment model of evaluation), but immutable objects such as numbers or strings are, well, immutable, and the = operation played on a bare symbol always defines it in the current scope. However, an improvement on this regard is coming on Python 3000.
...code goes here... ...more statements...
Python's parsing of vertical whitespace is not ambiguous. Lambda doesn't support statements because Guido doesn't want to. I would easily allow something like:
higher_order_function(lol, lambda x, y:
, next_arg, etc)
Or, if Python didn't have statements (which are the real flaw IMO), you would just do something like:
higher_order_function(lol, lambda x, y: progn(
whatever,
whatever), next_arg, etc)
Define progn as lambda *a: a[-1].
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Oops, my first example got screwed up. I meant:
... This is like my 6th attempt.)
Argh, this never shows up properly. Consider % a space.
higher_order_function(lol, lambda x, y:
%%%%code goes here...
%%%%more statements...
, next_arg, etc)
(Wow, I hadn't realized how badly does Slash suck. No proper code formatting, ugly HTML formatting, no HTML entities, no Unicode support,
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
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.
You don't happen to be mrs. roberts's child, do you?
This is insightful? Since when is opinion stated as fact insightful?
OK--here goes:
Perl has to many shifted numbers as part of is syntax.
English words are too hard to spell.
Lisp is backwards and all of the parentheses make it hard to read.
Python is named after a snake making it a stupid name.
Python is named after a comedy troupe making it a stupid name.
C would be good except that it takes to long to make anything work.
Python makes me indent which makes me feel like a little kid.
Indent is not mandatory in most languages.
Fortran makes you start in a set number of columns from left and the lack of case sensitivity makes it seem to simplistic for anything worthwhile.
Objective C replaces periods with closed brackets making you type too much.
Put any of these languages on a server farm and milk a cow.
I'm a pony.
Basic is the best language because I've never bothered to learn anything else. It can scale up and you can write libraries to get almost anything done you want. Its easy to program in. I don't use goto that much.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Exactly. Perl is fast, powerful and modular, and CPAN is near infinite. You can write perl anyway you want - even legibly. The only beef that a non-kneejerk person could have with perl is that it's big, and that its class definitions suck. And a few of the 'reserved' identifiers that seem a little bit contrived or opportunistic at times. The other higher level languages all lack library support and expressive power. Only their respective ages (all younger than perl) makes that forgivable; it took more than ten years to get java to support generics after all.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Opinion or fact?
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Compare that to Perl5 OO. Perl5 OO is dog food, yet Perl 5 library authors consistently use it to define their library interfaces. All those libraries may toss the OO and rely on hashes of closures behind the scenes -- I haven't checked -- but library programmers evidently find it advisable not to share their elegant abstractions with users. Instead, they use objects, which (in Perl5) are wonky, bizarre, and understood by practically no one who isn't a Perl language guru. The fact that library authors define their interfaces in terms of constructs that few people understand seems like an admission that Perl has its own problems creating elegant abstractions.
Actually, the idea is that you can know enough about Python to work competently with Python code and still have enough brainspace left over to be an expert in something besides programming. Try THAT with Perl.... I mean, try that sometime when you're not ten times as smart as I amIf you're going to link to a website, first make sure there is actually something there.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
[1] - http://docs.python.org/modindex.html
Python does NOT lack expressive power either. Things like list comprehensions are beautiful:
http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pytut/ListComprehensions.html
Both powerful and easy to remember without needing any extra documentation
Y'know, for a few minutes here and there I've actually thought the same thing. I find it pretty darn creepy that people who are so religious (synonym: irrational) are pumping out programming languages.. but then I realized that perhaps an ounce of fantasy and irrationality are REQUIRED to be able to make a good programming language. After all, you're going to be slogging and working night after night for DECADES to get a language to the point where it'll stick, and that takes blind faith, not rationality. So.. I'll stick to using the products of religious men, simply because they're usually the only ones crazy enough to see such craziness through.
I have some friends who have worked in motion picture render pipeline development.
As I understand it, C integration is a big deal for them, but more importantly because of typical movie time pressure they pretty much know in advance that NOBODY working in that area has time to write documentation, and most of the time to write comments either, and most of the time the code will be utter dreck and not properly designed (at a class by class level).
Code that does very interesting things doesn't HAVE to be unintelligible, and in the cases where it's heading in that direction (because it HAS to for things like functional programming or continuation tricks and so on) copious comments and full documentation (something the CPAN culture has installed in many Perl coders) let you get the best of both worlds.
However, in a situation where only having the time to write crap and not document it is the standard for the entire industry, you almost certainly want a simple language that doesn't give you enough rope to hang yourself.
Java, Python etc etc...
And of course the C integration helps enormously.
1. Hugging trees;
2. Hating people that think differently than you; and
3. Disregarding that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,
I would say it's too late for that.
DISCLAIMERS:
a) I'm an agnostic. My will is strong: I refuse to have blind faith in the existence of a deity, but I also refuse to have blind faith in its non-existence;
b) I'm a Perl programmer;
c) This post was meant to be funny. Please, laugh. Or not.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
God damn piece of shit!
Ah, another average VB developer speaks up.
And you are:
:) .
1. Mocking environmentalism;
2. Thinking by hating a religion I hate the gullible fools that follow it (if anything, I hate the immoral atheists who created it to abuse their lambs);
3. Disregarding that illogical and contradictory things don't need to be disproven, and that even if presented with a non-illogical and non-contradictory belief such as "flying green elephants no-one has ever seen", it's their task to prove, not mine to disprove.
But I get your point
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Python tends to force, particularly for shorter programs, much more readable code to a third party. It conversely requires you to perhaps be a lot more verbose in some ways, but not verbose enough in others. In longer programs, sometimes you have to maybe look a little carefully to understand the implicit type of a variable, and the whitespace code grouping can cause problems on multi-developer projects (one person uses spaces, another tabs, tabstops don't line up and suddenly one spaced line looks like it is in the same level as a tabbed lines). So I can understand ways python *can* become hard to maintain/read, but my experience is that Perl code has a much stronger tendency to go unintelligible. The indentation, while possible to mess up without affecting program behavior, can be and often is not carefully tended to. Not helping perl's image is the fact that people teaching perl/posting on forums seem to constantly be in an obfuscated perl contest. Perl enthusiasts seem to believe they only have worth if they write unreadable code.
I say this as a person who has moved from Python to Perl due to various reasons. Perl I had a basic understanding of, but the various posts of code snippets on forums for specific tasks had always made me nervous about perl and glad for python. Now that some issues in the python world forced me to perl, I've found perl *can* be a great and straightforward language, so long as the developers are not *trying* to show off how cool their perl skills are.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Lisp and Smalltalk developer here. Yeah, Perl is a fucking piece of shit and braindamage. Larry Wall is no language designer.
Perl 6 != Perl 5++
Perl 5 is a interpreter which happens to grok Perl 5. It's the one and only implementation that implements all features (by definition). There is no other specification.
Perl 6 is not a interpreter or compiler. It's a specification and as such there will be many implementations. Do you know what the current "release" of C++ is? See...
Want to use Perl 6 today? Use Pugs.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Nah, that's an orthogonal concern. Some people write intelligible, maintainable code that is interesting ("Oh, he's developed a language and grammar for the valid inputs and is parsing it with a state machine."). Other people write unintelligible, unmaintainable code that is interesting in that you have to find the key that unlocks its mysteries ("Oh, this block of five thousand lines indented up to ten levels deep is is just a huge case statement indexed by single variable wrapped in an infinite loop; conceptually its a state machine and I can chop it up into reasonably sane pieces in a few hours.").
Of course, other people write maintainable code that's boring ("Oh, he's making the user configure this in XML, and he's using JAXB and schema to generate a DOM tree."). Others write unmaintainable code that's boring ("Crap, he's got all the lexical and grammatical rules littered through all the processing code. It's going to take ages for me to sort this out.")
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So which implementation is of Perl6 faster? Pugs or perl6 on parrot?
1. Mocking environmentalism; Environmentalist "atheists" beg for mocking, because their deity is the environment. (What is the "supreme being"? Mother Earth or Mother Nature, of course.) If they want to be taken seriously (by me, anyway), they should at least be consistent. 2. Thinking by hating a religion I hate the gullible fools that follow it (if anything, I hate the immoral atheists who created it to abuse their lambs); Being "religious" doesn't mean anything. Where one chooses to put one's faith is, and no, it's not the same thing. Though I may disagree with the doctrine of some religions, I don't consider them "gullible fools" unless they are Scientologists. After that, remember that believing in Evolution requires that one be worse at math than one thinks he is, and it also requires that one have more faith than the much-maligned Christian. 3. Disregarding that illogical and contradictory things don't need to be disproven, and that even if presented with a non-illogical and non-contradictory belief such as "flying green elephants no-one has ever seen", it's their task to prove, not mine to disprove. This sword cuts both ways. I've yet to see anyone prove to me that my faith is misguided, and having someone scream "blind fool!" at me does nothing to sway my faith.
I am a Christian, and that's fine. If you're not, that's fine too. I don't have to agree with you. You don't have to agree with me. The differences we have (and a willingness to discuss them civilly) are what keeps life "interesting".
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
1. It's faith
*Any* faith is misguided. You may think something probable, work with a theory, build new premises upon reasoning on existing ones (and remember to carry, add and multiply probabilities if you're not basing on facts!), or just play what-if, but blindly believing on something "just cuz", "just cuz it's nice", "just cuz lotsa ppl think so" or "just cuz there has to be sumthin lool" is not going to help anything or anyone.
But to each their own. I'm equipped with a brain so I like using it and refuse to accept things blindly and irrationally.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
I agree, but I'd like to generalize your thoughts a bit: In order to make anything "good", you need an ounce of idealism. Being an idealist somewhat frees you from the bounds of what works, allowing the exploration of what should work. It provides a grand vision, and, often, the wherewithal to seek that vision. The idealist may not ever realize their vision, but in striving for it, they will usually affect the status quo of similar projects and/or products.
That said, every idealist needs a foil, to prevent them from running amok. :)
Neener neener neener.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
> I've yet to see anyone prove to me that my faith is misguided...
Christian, huh? Ok, I'll take up the challenge...
1. Why would an omniscient god bother creating life? Before it creates the life it already knows exactly what it all will do - and how it'll be rewarded or punished.
2. Why would all all-powerful, all-good, all knowing god allow the holocaust, witch hunts, misc genocides, plagues, etc? Before you say "philosophical problem of evil" note that the holocaust could have been prevented by just changing a few males to females in the womb (hitler, etc) - which would have robbed them of political power but not free will.
3. According to the bible, the christian god is a jealous god. Exactly what would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-creator god have to be jealous of?
4. Why would the father of all mankind favor one particular nation over others?
5. According to the bible we were created in God's image. Ok, why would god need nostrils and toes?
6. Why would an all-powerful and all-knowing god have his message put into a book that is so subject to interpretation. So subject in fact, that there are hundreds of christian denominations and congregations that all believe that all others are wrong. So subject in fact that it takes years of bible study at a university to be considered an authority on using the bible to answer some questions.
7. Why would an all-good, loving god create childhood leukemia?
8. Why would an all-good, loving god torture the majority of people in the world that die unaware of the christian gospels to eternal torture? Especially when you consider that most people believe in whatever religious is dominant in their area (born in Egypt? then you're a moslim, born in India? then you're buddist or hindu, born in Peoria, Illinois? then you're a christian)
9. Why is it that a church over a thousand years old (Catholic Church) that follows absolute and timeless teachings of god is trailing progress in ethical and moral standards lead by the secular community? And why is it that the church at one time permitted, allowed and encouraged witch hunts, slavery, death penalties, etc - and no longer does today?
Well, the answer is simple - the whole concept of god is something that came out of tribal communities thousands of years ago. It's primitive and full of contradictions and misinformation. For thousands of years science was held back as christians tortured, jailed, executed, etc anyone that would dare to contradict info or believe in anything but the bible.
There are quite a few other reasons not to believe in the bible, but I'd say that the above 9 is already overkill.
Maybe it will eventually be as fast as C, or faster, but that seems unlikely.
What's interesting about this perl6 binary isn't that it's actually fast, but that it's as usable as a perl5 binary in that you don't have to mess around with the VM itself.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can criticize Ruby for a lot of things, but to claim that it's uglier than Python is laughable.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ruby 1.9 has a new VM that's double the speed.
Ruby 1.9 supports Unicode.
Ruby has taint, just like Perl. Has for years.
Ruby for VMS. There are a few people working on porting it to z/OS, but I don't think anyone cares much; Rails sites on System z hardware tend to run on Linux for z/OS.
Ruby's packaging system (RubyGems) is fully cross platform and supports dependency nesting. Has been for years.
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you know what you're doing writing manageable perl is easy. I don't think I've ever seen a CPAN module I didn't readily understand.
I'm always welcome to examples of the contrary, but people can write crappy code in pretty much any language. Perl just lets crappy programmers take crappy code to the next level.
But, it's also very good about getting out of the way if you know what you're doing.
Theres a lot of revolutionary features in parrot. Its unpopular so its fun to bash it but I expect the
The same way people who bash Linux just don't get it, the people who bash parrot just don't get it. Peel back the covers and you'll be impressed.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
No anonymous lambdas, hmm? That does seem like an advantage to Perl.
I have SICP right here; can you give me a reference that says you cannot write to lexicals in proper closures? You can in Perl. (Admittedly you can in Python as well; close over an aggregate and modify an element of that aggregate.)
Whatever other reason Guido may give for not including multi-line lambdas, he has said:
Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles
how to invest, a novice's guide
Python has a clean small footprint? Compared to Perl maybe but its got nothing on Lua.
True but Ruby 1.9 is a 'developer release' ie not planned for general consumption..
No.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
The problem with people so anxious to write off the (possible) existence of God is that they seek to make the evidence fit their views, instead of letting their views change in view of the evidence. (The same might be said for some, though not all, people of faith. I think it is as important for one to know why one holds a particular belief or opinion as it is to actually hold it.)
As for your statement that "faith" is a problem, think a little more about what "faith" is. Think about it the next time you go to sit-- will the chair hold you? How do you know? Is it because the chair held you the last time you sat down in it, or did you actually test it to ensure its stability? Are you assuming it will hold you? That, my friend, is "faith", even if it's in a chair.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
I agree with that. I would add one more thing... compiling. :(
Compiling to a bytecode is good enough -- doesn't have to be to the raw metal.
For years Perl has almost had it bit it still doesn't work
Why would an omniscient god bother creating life? Before it creates the life it already knows exactly what it all will do - and how it'll be rewarded or punished.
I can't answer for God, but I would guess it's for the same reason that people have children, even though they know that the kids will be hell-raisers from the start. I have three boys of my own, and I knew that they wouldn't be angels all the time, before they were even born. I decided to have them anyway. Personally, I choose to dwell on the (relatively few) times when they do something right. It warms my heart. Maybe it does the same thing to God?
Why would all all-powerful, all-good, all knowing god allow the holocaust, witch hunts, misc genocides, plagues, etc? Before you say "philosophical problem of evil" note that the holocaust could have been prevented by just changing a few males to females in the womb (hitler, etc) - which would have robbed them of political power but not free will.
Ah. Well, "simply changing the sex of the person" would actually result in a different person, one way or the other, and thus change the dynamic of the situation that such an action was meant to prevent. Ask any parent if their children had to be taught to lie, cheat, or steal. You'll find that a vast majority (very close to all of them) spent most of their time teaching the children to do right. It may be that there were people that could have prevented such horrible events from happening in the first place, but they failed to "step up" to the task.
According to the bible, the christian god is a jealous god. Exactly what would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-creator god have to be jealous of?
Mankind has a habit of placing their faith in made-up gods instead of in the One True God. At the time that God described Himself as "jealous", consider what people were doing: making idols of gods, be they imagined or otherwise, and praying to them instead of Him.
Why would the father of all mankind favor one particular nation over others?
Likely because of the habits of their forefathers. That's just my guess, though.
According to the bible we were created in God's image. Ok, why would god need nostrils and toes?
Look in a mirror and ask yourself the same question. Why does your reflection have nostrils or toes? Is it not your image?
Why would an all-powerful and all-knowing god have his message put into a book that is so subject to interpretation. So subject in fact, that there are hundreds of christian denominations and congregations that all believe that all others are wrong. So subject in fact that it takes years of bible study at a university to be considered an authority on using the bible to answer some questions.
I think that a lot of this stems from the fact that most of the people making the doctrinal decisions do not consider the cultural ramifications of "back then" on what why things were done or said, and how it shaped that particular religion. (This applies to Judaism, Christianity, and most any religion, in one way or another.) From a Christian perspective, I know that many "denominations" come about because of disagreements on what certain passages mean or to whom they were written. Some think that a passage was intended to apply to all people in all ages, when it was actually meant only for the original recipients. Sometimes, it's the other way around.
Why would an all-good, loving god create childhood leukemia?
My opinion on this is that it is a natural result of the corruption of the human genome over time.
Why would an all-good, loving god torture the majority of people in the world that die unaware of the christian gospels to eternal torture? Especially when you consider that most people believe in whatever religious i
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
I have no mod points today, so someone please mod the parent up from 0 points. His example is perfect, and people who know Perl can think of hundreds like this one.
I totally agree that the linguist's design made Perl much more readable than many other languages. Provided the author actually knows Perl, and cares to write in a readable way. And also much less boring and more creative, as a side-effect.
Duke Nuke'm Forever is just waiting for HURD 1.0....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Right, but all the Ruby 1.9 features will be going into Ruby 2.0 when they're fully baked and the problems are worked out.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Your answers indicate a quick and simple dismissal of the questions that you clearly don't fully understand. I'd recommend reviewing these questions later when you've got more time to think about them.
- anonymous because i'm an atheist in america (prefer to avoid that to be known at work)
And regarding lambda, I don't give a damn about what Guido said, the obvious solution of having its contents wrapped by INDENT and DEDENT tokens is clear and simple. Probably, he just doesn't like how it looks when DEDENT is followed by a comma.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Even if the evolutionary theory is actually closer to an hypothesis (and there'll be people who will argue against this, but I don't need to), a sound, probably incomplete (numerical probability) hypothesis is better than a cheap wildcard solution to every problem that can't stand on its own. As for your statement that "faith" is a problem, think a little more about what "faith" is. Think about it the next time you go to sit-- will the chair hold you? I don't know for sure, and I sure as hell don't have blind faith on that (if I don't have faith on Santa, the tooth fairy, or your favourite imaginary friend, how would I have faith in a chair!?). I sit on it because I need to, and because it's likely that it'll stand my weight. Likewise, I go out because I need to, and because it's likely that I won't get robbed or killed, though I would be an idiot if I had such faith. Faith is for idiots. Smart people work on informed guesses, and never convert initial assumptions into facts by art of magic.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Perhaps you are just trying to ignore the fact that it's entirely possible to come to a position of having faith in God without being a sheep? - anonymous because i'm an atheist in america (prefer to avoid that to be known at work) Where do you work? A church? There isn't any place that I can imagine that your faith (or lack thereof) would really matter.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Some people describe C as a "universal assembler", because it's designeed to fit in at the lowest level that doesn't directly describe the hardware, so as to maximize the utility of its portability. It is therefore either the highest low-level language, the lowest high-level language, or it straddles the line. I'd go so far as to say that it defines that line.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I haven't really been paying attention to Perl 6 development, largely because it's not here yet, and I have more pressing things in front of me.
That said, I took a look at this Parrot thing, which was news to me, and it sounds pretty darn decent. A quick perusal of the FAQ was enough to convince me these guys know what they're doing.
Perl: it's a handy tool. I'm not obsessed with it, but I like it. If Perl 6 allows me to do things quicker and/or easier, then I'll like it too. One thing to keep in mind is that people already know Perl. It's a heck of a lot easier to learn a few new features and constructs, than to migrate over to a whole new language. I don't do Ruby nor Python (yet), and I'm not so easily wowed by glorified build scripts like Rails. Perl just might be the one for me.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
> I understand them quite well, thank you. Your questions are cookie-cutter from those that don't want to believe in God.
No on both accounts. Go back to the second question that deals with the problem of good or evil. The traditional answer to this question is to say that god couldn't intervene since that would destroy free will. However, this stock reply fails to answer why god would just slightly change the situation in order to avoid 6,000,000+ deaths.
Examine the rest of the question more closely in a similar manner.
And as far as not wanting to believe in god - the issue typically isn't about wanting to believe in god - it's about confidence in faith as a way of knowing the truth.
I've read the official reasons, they're ridiculous. I got the distinct impression the devs hadn't read one page of Java or
I have a general idea why it's taking so long... there are too many "because we can"s, "I feel like it"s, and "just because"s.
The Perl developers have lost their GD minds.
I hope that I understand that wrong and that you don't consider unintelligible, unmaintainable, code 'interesting' in a good sense. First off, no, that's not what's being said.
Second, good code isn't always easy to maintain. I stared at a system at work (won't say which employer) and was humbled. It was code. I understood all of the syntax. It was fairly clean code. It was impossible for me to fully understand without hitting stacks of reference texts (not language texts). It took a team of people to maintain that one person's code. It was worth it. It did what everyone thought impossible - the best and brightest in the industry had tried and failed for many years.
It was also code that wasn't really practical in most languages. It required a set of language features that aren't easily found in today's Algol/C-derived universe of high-level languages.
Perl 5 offers some features that other languages typically don't (the integration between code and regular expressions comes to mind). These aren't killer features in the sense that any large system needs them in order to function, but they are quite useful. Python embraces a more limited set of features, but results in code that's easier to understand. This can be good for some sorts of environments, but in my experience, good developers don't need the hand-holding, and bad developers will write noise in anything.
Perl 6 offers a wider universe still of language features harvested from Smalltalk, LISP, Haskell and other places that many useful language tools have developed. Python is going the wrong way. Reducing language features to a core that can be maintained by even the lowest-common-denominator programmers isn't helping to solve the hard problems (hard problems can still be solved and solved well in Python, but the best solution to a problem isn't always available).
All that said, I find it frustrating that Perl 6 took center stage in this article... the really interesting part is the compiler development tools that are now a core part of the distribution. I've played with them a bit, and WOW... they really are amazingly powerful once you understand them. PGE alone is an oasis in a desert of painful-to-use compiler-writing tools.
dick
I'm a Christian, too, and that's just plain wrong. Believing in evolution (either in the sense of "believing it is true", or "believing it is the best model yet proposed for the way the world works in the area it covers", the latter being the usual sense of "belief" when discussing scientific theories, which is rather different from religious belief) requires neither of those things.
Then you don't know the first thing about science, which is that no model in science is ever proven, it is either tested and disproven or tested and yet to be disproven. And those tests are conducted by generating predictions from the model and attempting to verify them.
(You also don't seem to understand that "evolution" isn't, properly speaking, a single theory [or hypothesis], it is a body of theory, an entire area of research, and that the current models in evolution are, indeed, theories that have made predictions, and those predictions have been examined and not disproven.)
Again, you don't understand science. Science doesn't prove explanations, it draws testable conclusions from models, tests them, and rejects the model if the test fails*. Since its always possible that a model has implications not previously understood, and since future tests built on those implications may yet fail, nothign is ever proven in science, a model is either rejected or accepted provisionally.
Actually, there is considerable evidence that new species have arisen from existing species, including directly observed speciation. Of course, the tests of hypotheses whose subject matter is not directly observable are somewhat indirect, but that doesn't change the process, or its validity.
The tests of various elements of evolutionary theory are, in fact, "reproducible, etc." The understanding that a particular set of more modern species evolved from a particular common ancestor species in the distant past may be a conjecture, a hypothesis, or a theory (there are all kinds of predictions that are testable that can be drawn and tested based on such a belief, and often they have been; some, however, have indications in the evidence but no tests proposed or made, and so may only be conjecture.)
But you make a category error if you confuse the fact that some specific widely-seen-as-likely chains of descent are not tested with the idea that evolutionary theory is itself mere speculation.
* this is a bit of a simplification; in fact, models which are disproven by testing generally continue to be dominant with the caveat that they fail in certain conditions for which there is no explanation until a new model is developed which explains the results for which the old model fails and the results for which it succeeded, then the new model becomes the dominant model.