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The Perl 6 Advent Calendar
An anonymous reader writes "Larry Wall wasn't joking when he said that Perl 6 would be ready by Christmas. Perhaps not this Christmas, but that hasn't stopped a group of people (including head Rakudo developers Patrick Michaud and Jonathan Worthington) from putting together an Advent Calendar, featuring one cool Perl 6 feature every day until Christmas. Topics currently covered include how to get and build Rakudo (the most actively developed and progressed implementation of Perl 6) and the new Metaoperators. For those wondering when Perl 6 will be finished: Rakudo will be having its official 'production release' (dubbed Rakudo Star) April 2010."
... is Duke Nukem Forever is being rewritten in Perl 6.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Waiting for Perl 6 seems a lot like waiting for the Messiah to arrive. And even when (if) it happens there'll be some people saying "Nope. Not the right one... Keep looking...."
...it's too late for PERL. The system and kernel engineers chose to stick with C, PHP ran all over it with less cryptic syntax, and all the web 2.0 "me too" morons are now hacking away in Ruby and Python.
But really, PERL's demise was PHP. Especially since the CLI version of PHP, turning him into a true general purpose language.
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Perl Programming Feed Feed Distiller
from an outsider's view (I have NO perl experience, and i intend to die like that if at all possible) it seems like perl has slowly moved from an ubiquitous scripting language to a fringe research project over the last few years. it reminds me somewhat of the pascal/modula-2/oberon phenomenon. do perl afficionados think that this new version will enjoy the success that its predecessors have had?
Or hold your breath either
/. is getting so old.
Facile discussion of languages on
I'm still chuckling... nice.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I do most of my coding in perl 5. Perl 5's implementation is rock-solid, and CPAN has an absolutely fantastic selection of useful modules for perl 5.
If I was going to change to something other than perl 5, I would need some motivation. The clearest motivation I can see is that OOP in perl 5 is ugly and bolted on.
With that motivation, I have dabbled in ruby enough to write one nontrivial app. The thing is, perl 5 still beats the heck out of ruby in terms of implementation and libraries. As an example of this, in my ruby app I wanted to use some regex features that were not available in ruby 1.8, so I ended up using ruby 1.9. But ruby 1.9, and its regex engine, are relatively raw and buggy, and I ended up having serious problems that I had to work around. (Yes, I submitted a bug report. No, it hasn't been fixed yet.)
AFAICT, the main advantage of perl 6 over perl 5 is the same as ruby's main advantage over perl 5: OOP is implemented in a nicer way. The thing is, the disadvantages are even more magnified, because it's so raw and incomplete.
My current reaction to the situation is to plan on continuing to code in perl 5 until, say, 2015, and then check back to see how much ruby and perl 6 have improved by then.
Find free books.
It looks like they are attempting to reinvent APL. (with the addition of regex operations).
I can imagine a single line of code will now require 10 to 100 lines of comments to describe the iterations and references going on.
I remember my classmates talked about Perl 6 and the Perl Virtual Machine when I was in High school. Now I'm graduating from college, and Perl 6 still hasn't been released.
Back that time he used Perl while I sticked with Python. Funny how time slips away.
6 seems to be the number of the thing you want, is about to come, and takes forever to finally come, if ever. Is not a coincidence that the number of the devil is 666, should be an unlisted sin or punishment in hell that forever waiting for something that from the start was promised to come soon. IPV6 is another much wanted "imminent" upgrade that will take still a big while to come, and i bet that Duke Nukem Forever was planned to get out in the 6th iteration. I hope that PHP6 dont takes the same fate as Perl and comes when scheduled.
Anyway, between waiting and getting a half-baked product, with problems that will avoid it being ever widely adopted, i prefer to wait till is really done.
CERN recently invoked the curse too: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR18.09E.html.
Why couldn't they use a Perl blog framework like Movable Type instead of Wordpress...
24 ways takes a general forus on web development while PHP Advent is supposed to be [1] more PHP focused.
[1] Though that doesn't seem to *actually* be the case...
Downmix -- Artscene News
and the wait for Perl 6 take forever
the pascal/modula-2/oberon phenomenon
Funny, that's what a lot of people who liked modula-2 and oberon have said about the recently released Go.
do perl afficionados think that this new version will enjoy the success that its predecessors have had?
Do you mean popularity or success?
Popularity is related to its success, since a bigger community can provide a significant boost to a language, both in terms of library development and in terms of perceived viability as part of a commercial product.
But widespread use isn't really the same thing. If it's an effective and pleasant tool for those who choose it, then it's successful.
(And sometimes, a small, experienced, and smart community puts out better libraries and tools than a large one. Consider PHP.)
Tweet, tweet.
A Perl Monks poster has collected the address of 5 different Perl(-related) advent calendars:
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=810472
As he says, a "great tradition".
who's there?
Perl 6
I still haven't figured it out yet, so let me take this chance.
Can someone help me clarify: am I right about this?
- Perl 6 is the successor to Perl 5, it will not exist as an implementation but as a specification. That specification is finished and definitive. It is owned by Larry Wall and small circle of his friends. They want everyone to implement interpreters for Perl 6;
- An official test suite for Perl 6 exists and it is complete. Anything passing this test suite IS Perl 6. The test suite is stored with Pugs, an "early" attempt at a Perl 6-implementation that is no longer developed;
- Perl 6 will not be interpreted directly by any one interpreter, like earlier versions of Perl, but it will be interpreted by a VM (Parrot) that 'plays' bytecode fed to it by several language-specific bytecode-compilers that act as plug-ins to Parrot. Parrot is owned by a bunch of friends of Larry Wall;
- Several groups of people started implementing Perl 6. Pugs was one of the earliest. It is now unfinished and dead. Rakudo is the implementation-in-progress that gets the most attention now, because it is closest to being finished. It will be released for production in April 2006, which will mean "Perl 6.0 is out and it works". As with Pugs and any other bytecode-compiler for Perl 6 though, you will need Parrot to run it. Rakudo, Pugs et cetera are owned by their respective developers.
Forgive me the long description of what I now think is Perl 6, but the various websites I try to find answers on aren't making it a lot more transparent.
Could someone comment on this if I misunderstood something?
And what about these views. Are people right who say:
- Perl 6 is not finished by any means, but the people working on it don't seem to care as much, and instead go on to question the validity of the concept "finished".
- Meanwhile, Perl 5, the ruling king of scripting languages has become fringe, and Perl 6 is largely viewed as a toy for philosophically-minded scholars.
?
Rakudo Star is not a production release. In the linked blog pmichaud says he would like to stay away from words like "finished" or "stable" and calls Rakudo Star a "useful" and "usable" release. The "Star" itself means literal *, or "whatever", to get away from commiting versioning or release engineering terms. The release will be simply something you can hack on without major inconveniences.
Perl for people with no background in computer science ? Are you serious ?
My experience is that people who do not like Perl are generally weak in computer science. Perl internal is more similar to lisp than to shell. For example, closures are very effective in Perl.
All the elegance of Perl need a good level of computer science to be fully understood.
The sysadmins I have met that had weak background in computer science hated Perl and were very proud of their shell hacks.
For me, the smart sysadmins solves quickly and elegantly the problem with Perl before the IT departement finished writing the specification of a steam engine.
Because I hate the ASCII characters 65 through 90 and 97 through 122.
Perl is one of those languages that most people meet in passing because someone else has hacked up a script to get something out of some file. Which is sad, because understanding what makes Perl different from other languages and why it is often a better choice for wrangling data isn't going to be obvious in one lousy foreach search-and-replace hack. And most people exposed to perl scripts in this manner fall over on the difference between scalar and list context and never discover why perl expressions like $lookup{$term}++ will save them years of work, while making their analysis scripts go faster.
I write Perl modules day in, day out to cope with processing DB2 internals in an attempt to model and improve them. Object-oriented Perl makes this easy, fast and effective. Closures (which I'm sure aren't understood by 90% of the Slashdot community) back this up being able to create anonymous subroutines with data attached which can be processed later. Perl is also effective for parallel task analysis - I have modules for jobserving many tasks across multiple machines and Perl threads make it easy to fire a task off while something else is done.
Perl is an essential part of data analysis for any serious volume of unstructured data. However, I'm not unhappy that it is little understood. Perl makes in the impossible merely hard. If everyone knew how to leverage Perl, I wouldn't have so much fun.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
call me when done andreshidalgofondado@hotmail.com
To test out Perl 6 in an IDE environment, try Padre.
http://padre.perlide.org/download.html
NOTE 1: Install the 'Padre Standalone Plus Six' package, not the 'Padre Standalone' package)
NOTE 2: If you install it on windows, ensure you have a few hundred MB to spare on c:\ -- the drive targeting for the Install MSI does not work properly yet.
"I, Toby Haynes, am a genius. You are not. Go away."
So -- Perl 6, the language for stuck-up assholes.
The most obvious pun. What's the state of the onion like these days Larry?