Perl 6, Early, With Rakudo Star

Perl 6 may have been "finally coming within reach" in 2004, but now it's even closer. Reader rnddim writes "The Perl 6 implementation Rakudo Star has been released today for 'early adopters.' This release of Rakudo is different from the normal monthly compiler releases in that it is bundled with a draft of a Perl 6 book, and several modules. It's not complete, and it's not as fast as it should be, but Rakudo in its current state is proving to be usable and useful. Rakudo Star releases will come monthly or as major features or bugfixes are made. It is available for download at github.com."

Comments

Heh

[Adambomb]

Calling anything whatsoever that involves Perl 6 'early' is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks.

Re:Heh

[winkydink]

Wow. SC2, now Perl 6. Can Duke Nukem Forever be far behind?

Re:Heh

[Neil Blender]

Heh, I was worried about its utter absurdity in 2001.

Re:Heh

[Surt]

Not more than another decade or so behind, I'd imagine.

Re:Heh

[PerfectionLost]

Can Duke Nukem Forever be far behind?

This actually pushes out their launch date as they have to update all their Perl 5 code.

Re:Heh

[herve_masson]

FYI, "Duke Nukem Forever" is entirely coded in perl6. Hence the delay.

A decade too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

If this had come out in 2001 or 2002, shortly after Larry's original Perl 6 announcement in 2000, then it might be useful. But 2010 is far too late.

Perl 6's ship has sailed. Perl 5, which was already very well established, has had enough difficulty fending off PHP, Python and Ruby. Perl 6 has no hope in hell. The benefits it brings are minimal, and surely not enough to drag anyone away from Perl 5, PHP, Python and Ruby, among the many other languages it's competing against.

Perl 6 is a stillborn fetus, left lying on the ground for a decade, getting all smelly and rotten.

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

But 2010 is far too late.

Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.

(That's setting aside the fact that a Perl 6 released in 2001 would not have included amazing features such as roles, grammars, constraints, multidispatch, and autothreading hyperoperators. "Minimal benefits" indeed!)

Re:A decade too late.

[afabbro]

But 2010 is far too late.

Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.

(That's setting aside the fact that a Perl 6 released in 2001 would not have included amazing features such as roles, grammars, constraints, multidispatch, and autothreading hyperoperators. "Minimal benefits" indeed!)

Minimal to perl's real audience: sysadmins.

I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins. That's certainly where I've seen the language most widely used. By the time something is big enough to be a real development project - or it comes from a natural "a developer writes this" angle - people are usually working in python or ruby.

Time was when perl was a web development language. Slashdot - created in 1998 - is an example. But few people start a new web project in perl. (Yes, I'm sure you're jumping in now to paste URLs....I said few people, compared to php, python, java, ruby, etc.). Desktop GUI programming in perl? Can be done but rarely is/was. Glue code? Sure...tying together things and using DBI, etc. But mostly perl is used for system things, not application things.

I love perl. But it has never outgrown its roots as a log-processing utility. Yes, sure, you can do all kinds of amazing things with it - talk to DBs, write GUIs, handle web CGI, OOP, etc. But few people do that. HTML::Mason (perl's answer to php)? Sure, you can find some older sites where it's rooted in their ecosystem (e.g., Amazon), but not many people are firing up new HTML::Mason projects. How many books were published for HTML::Mason? One. CakePHP has at least four and Ruby on Rails has God knows how many, which gives you an idea of mindshare, and those are very new frameworks. Heck, even symfony and CodeIgniter have books. Not that I'm endorsing them, but how many new perl books have been published? Where are the great perl-based frameworks? Perl is a systems utility language. Not many new books are published on bash or awk these days, either.

BTW, what languages can you program in for the Google App Engine? Java and Python, not Java and perl. Who did Google hire? Guido, not Larry. Next language to be added to GAE? Probably Go or maybe php. Perl is not on the radar.

Again, I love perl. Used it since 3.x-something. Coincidentally, Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl is sitting two feet from my monitor as I type this. But who really does large OOP projects in perl? There's a book on php design patterns, for pity's sake, but no one has publishedone on perl. There is a wiki, but to me that speak volumes (no pun intended) about where the developer mindset is.

You can say that's unfair, or short-sighted, or just crowd fashion. Fair enough. But people vote with their eyeballs.

So no, I don't think most people care about perl6. Most people who use perl don't do more than open a file, run some regex, and maybe make a DB connection.

Re:A decade too late.

[jjohnson]

Why?

Because a significant factor in Perl's success in the 90s was the absence of competitors that were similarly powerful and accessible. Nowadays Perl 6 has to compete for community-share with PHP, Python, and Ruby. Will Perl 6 be good enough, and come with enough supporting software like web frameworks, to steal mindshare back from those communities?

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

You can say that's unfair, or short-sighted, or just crowd fashion.

I'll do you one better: it's hearsay supported by anecdotal evidence. The existence of one Mason book versus a hundred PHP/MySQL books is evidence of... publishers. Larry's not working at Google is evidence of... he turned them down. Did you know that the top Perl books sold still outpace the top Ruby and Rails books sold?

You're welcome to argue that your perceptions and feelings add up to evidence of something, but "Languages which hipsters with ironic facial hair hack in coffee shops in San Francisco" is a very small data point, even if you could measure it accurately.

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

Will Perl 6 be good enough, and come with enough supporting software like web frameworks, to steal mindshare back from those communities?

What suggests that any new language or version of a language has to "steal" attention from any other existing language to succeed?

Re:A decade too late.

[jjohnson]

If I'm programming in Python, then I'm not programming in Perl.

In the 90s, programming on the web meant programming in Perl; in the Unix world, it meant either Perl or SH (assuming you weren't going straight to C).

The problem for Perl 6 is that it has competitors now that are of arguably the same quality, if not better for various arguable reasons, and that IT professionals have an embarrassingly large array of choices in technologies to use, so much so that they consciously limit what they learn to keep it manageable. I haven't bothered with Ruby because my head's already full of languages and platforms and libraries and frameworks. I have no problem with Ruby (or Perl, for that matter). I just don't have the bandwidth. At this point, choosing to go back to Perl would mean abandoning something else that's taking up brainspace. If Perl 6 doesn't offer a big advantage to me over PHP or Python (and their supporting cast of software), then I have no reason to look at it.

If Perl 6 doesn't steal back some mindshare, it will become a niche language where it was once the King.

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

If I'm programming in Python, then I'm not programming in Perl.

There are six and a half billion people in the world programming in neither. Now I suffer no illusion that all of them will become programmers, but it's no long bet to believe that more of them will become programmers. I care about that helping them solve their problems far more than about getting the mayfly attention of people who flit between the latest releases of dozens of languages, because the latter will move on to Haskell Prime or Java 7 or Factor soon enough anyway.

Re:A decade too late.

[outZider]

Minimal to perl's real audience: sysadmins.

We should probably continue this.

PHP's real audience: 14 year old kids
Python's real audience: Basement dwelling jobless hacks
Ruby's real audience: No one, anymore

You: Troll.

Re:A decade too late.

[jjohnson]

Growing the community with new members, rather than stealing community from others, is a viable strategy. But I don't see Perl winning there against PHP.

The reason PHP is where it is today is because it was easy for web hosting companies to offer it, and it was easier to make PHP pages than to make Perl CGI scripts. It became the entry level web programming language, and that's how and why it caught on and flourished despite being manifestly worse than Perl and Python. And what holds back Python and Ruby is that they're not easily offered in shared hosting environments. How is Perl 6 going to compete there?

Re:A decade too late.

[lena_10326]

Sure, you can find some older sites where it's rooted in their ecosystem (e.g., Amazon),

FYI: Your information about Amazon is old. Mason is disliked by most current Amazon SDEs and generally considered legacy crap. Calling it part of Amazon's ecosystem is just not accurate anymore. Maybe in year 2000, but not today. Sure there might be a couple teams left supporting mason but it's often some obscure admin tool used no one wants to touch. Clearly the vast majority of new Amazon dev work is in Java. A bunch of teams still crank out new Perl code but it's mostly infrastructure stuff without Mason. There is a bunch of C++ code but it's being slowly whittled away with Java replacements. A few a small projects are in Ruby/PHP/Python but those are minuscule.

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

How is Perl 6 going to compete there?

I don't know. My interest lies in doing other things with Perl 6. I'd like to see a minimal hosting environment for Perl 6 applications based on something like Parrot bytecode, but we're not quite to the point where we can bundle an entire application, run it in its own memory space, and offer sandboxing and other limits.

(I agree completely about PHP's advantages in the cheap shared hosting world.)

Re:A decade too late.

[oldhack]

"... people who flit between the latest releases of dozens of languages ..."

Perl 6 is one among those dozens. Well, it might be one day if they ever manage a stable and reasonably complete release.

Re:A decade too late.

[osu-neko]

If I'm programming in Python, then I'm not programming in Perl.

This is either false, or trivially true but utterly irrelevant, depending on what you meant.

I program in PHP, Python, and Perl, among other things. Granted, I don't do them literally at the same time, but I also don't drive and code at the same time -- that doesn't mean automobiles are a roadblock to Perl 6 adoption. If the new Perl does nifty stuff, I'll use it. If there are coders out there who pick one language and never use anything else, treat them the same way you'd treat a mechanic who refuses to use anything other than his favorite hammer to fix your car, regardless of the problem needing fixing.

Re:A decade too late.

[abulafia]

But 2010 is far too late.

Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.

The main reason isn't technical. Mindshare matters. Programmers are as fashion-conscious as any group of teens, and, for various good and not-so-good reasons, are far more herd-like. Sad to say, I think if they changed the name it would have a better chance of getting a chance. As is, people are playing with a new batch of languages, young programmers will mostly only run into Perl when they brush against system administration or legacy systems, and the name typically elicits a (frequently uninformed) "Yuck!" from a lot of people.

All of which I find sad - I love Perl. I still write most of my personal stuff in it, because it scales so insanely well from one-liners to complex apps. And it was a great, if only partial, counterpoint to the bondage-and-discipline bullshit Java got way too many people used to. But so i goes.

Re:A decade too late.

[Nethead]

I've still got the t-shirt that ORA gave out at LISA '96, signed by Larry, Tom, and Randal when the first camel book came out. I recall they gave out free ice cream that night too.

But I have to agree, all my perling has been to muck with router and server stuff.

Re:A decade too late.

[jjohnson]

You missed the point I made a couple lines later. As an IT guy, I have a bunch of choices of languages, frameworks, platforms, whatever. I have no choice but to pick and choose what I spend my limited brainpower on, and choosing X means not choosing Y. Choosing A, B, C, and D means getting familiar with them all, but master of none; choosing only A and B means mastery of one or both.

Along comes Perl 6, a language whose predecessor I last used 10 years ago, after I've made my professional repertoire heavily dependent on PHP/Drupal, Python/Django, and ASP.NET/C#. If I try to return to Perl in its new and unproven iteration, that means less attention/use for some part of my existing skills.

This is the problem Perl has now. In the 90s, it was the de facto standard scripting language. Now it's competing with a bunch of other languages (with their own software ecosystems) that are arguably comparable, if not better in certain ways. What does Perl 6 offer me that others don't, that justifies budgeting some of my time and mental space towards it? So far I haven't seen anything compelling enough to switch for.

Re:A decade too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like HTML::Mason, but it is very very far from the forefront of perl web development. There are many other mature, active and full-featured projects out there in just that niche. Talking about HTML::Mason shows a very obvious lack of knowledge on what is actually happening in the perl ecosystem.

Also, do you really think that a dev community with an 80% 'sysadmin' bias would actually invest the time and effort in perl6?

Re:A decade too late.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Will Perl 6 be good enough, and come with enough supporting software like web frameworks, to steal mindshare back from those communities?

That depends. Do you want it to be?

Ruby was around for quite awhile before Rails. Rails put it on the map, in a world that already had PHP, Python, Perl, Java, .NET... and Ruby, of course.

Now, at the moment, I don't particularly care about Perl6 -- it's on my radar as "interesting", but not really where I want it to be, yet. The same is true of Parrot, and it continues to surprise me that no one cares much about it -- implementations like Cadinal (Ruby on Parrot) seem to have died. Still, a killer app/framework could change my mind.

Re:A decade too late.

[AuMatar]

From someone who worked there 2 years ago- mason and Java are in totally different places and not competing with one another. The backend is dominated by C++ and Java. Mason was never used for backend- it's a front end concept. And it's widely in use there by the front end. I don't know of any front end code written in java or JSP. For frontend mason wasn't going anywhere, it was too easy to integrate perl with the middleware stack to talk to backend services. There wasn't any way as of 2 years ago to do that with php, python, etc. THey may end up using a different framework than mason, but it'll stay perl due to that.

Re:A decade too late.

[tknd]

In the old days the people that used perl were mostly script kids and because there wasn't much else on the web for doing fancy server stuff. All the resources at the time pointed to perl this perl that, because it was the easiest path. Nobody bothered to fire up the c compiler and write their CGI programs that way. This was the mid to late 90s and at that time object oriented programming was starting to pickup steam with C++ and Java. For that time, perl was certainly a competitor but all languages still carried major faults.

A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many. I had also done some Java based stuff so I also took a look at the Java positions. But most of the positions available were PHP positions and maybe a few Python positions here and there. Ruby was available but still too new to be in use; I didn't see any Ruby positions.

Between the interviews the surprising thing to note is the Java positions were largely big corporate based things and people would grill you on the intricacies of Java instead of talking about what the job really was about. It was very not personal, not that it needed to be, that's just the vibe I got. The perl interviews still grilled you but I noticed a huge difference in the demeanor of the interviewers. They were much humbler Maybe it was the fact that perl5 really was that big of a pain therefore made you humbler as a software dev or maybe it was the fact that they couldn't find any *good* perl developers. Anyway, I also made it a point to ask the perl shops why they chose perl. The answer is largely the same, "we were stuck with it". Somehow, someway, perl was chosen and nobody wanted to rewrite everything just so they could use ruby or python. After all, the language is a tool, not necessarily the actual solution.

The huge difference was, the perl people of today were no longer the script kids of the 90s. They were actual software engineers. Perl was typically just one piece of the puzzle and they were using a bunch of technologies together to get to their solutions. Meanwhile the Java shops were hooked to whatever the latest framework happened to be. At the PHP job listings seemed tailored to script kids. All kinds of widely varying positions from full blown systems to cheesy scripts for some person or small website. So to me it seemed that PHP slurped up all of the script kids that perl once was popular for and Java was still trying to be fashionable (not sure why).

Sure I understand your point and accept it; people today, right now, don't care about perl6. But not all of them are sysadmins. Some of them actually are legitimate software houses.

Now will all of these people move to perl6? That's a tough question. I sometimes ask myself if that would be a good business decision. For the business, having readily available devs for your language of choice means more candidates available to hire. In that sense Perl6 and even Ruby aren't good choices. You will definitely be forced to use what is mainstream if you are a seasoned or senior developer. The risks in using a new cutting edge technology aren't worth it if you don't need the cutting edge features to implement your solution.

But I don't doubt that history will repeat itself and some young software dev will make the same age old mistake and proclaim "we should use *this* because it is the newest and it is cool." That is after all how Ruby and Python got their starts. Some sort of fancy project called Ruby on Rails got a lot of publicity and suddenly everyone was interested.

Perl6 does have a lot to offer that is cutting edge so it does have a chance. Take a look at the PDF and the Regex Grammars section where they implement JSON in a few pages. And it isn't in "one liner" style. It is in true language grammar style just like everyone learns (or should learn) in their compiler studies. That's at least worthy of something.

I am also *very* interested in the perl6 object model as it seems to understand objects in a

Re:A decade too late.

[trwww]

> I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins.

You'd probably lose. Its everywhere.

> Where are the great perl-based frameworks?

Catalyst is where its at. And if you need a one-off framework, CGI::Application is easy as pie.

Coupled with the CPAN, the ecology of other languages look pretty useless to me.

There are a lot of people using perl. I've been introduced to new several new industries lately, and perl lets me develop apps that would need a team of HPCs and millions of dollars to do. And the new projects and requests keep on queuing up.

To me the biggest reason people don't hear much about perl is because its proponents and users are too busy getting stuff done.

Re:A decade too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you're saying developers don't write in Perl, and use Ruby as your example of what developers DO write in? I have literally NEVER heard of any business code written in Ruby, whereas I know several websites written in Perl.

And this is coming from someone who pretty much hates everything about Perl. I don't think Ruby is bad, it's just immature and not actually used in anything serious [yet].

Re:A decade too late.

[trwww]

Python and Ruby are slow as molasses compared to Perl. Automatic dereferencing is absurd. It makes you write lines of code when a simple memory lookup would do.

Re:A decade too late.

[jjn1056]

I'm glad mucking with Perl worked out for you. But there's a lot of modern Perl programmers turning out beautiful, terse and elegant code. So please don't globalize your experience. I wrote a Java applet once in 1995 but I don't keep saying that's all Java is good for.

Re:A decade too late.

[jjn1056]

To me the biggest reason people don't hear much about perl is because its proponents and users are too busy getting stuff done.

Or spending our time writing docs, blogs or more open source code to add to the vast opensource Perl ecosystem.

Re:A decade too late.

[arodland]

Rolsky used to think of Mason + mod_perl as providing the whole stack. He doesn't anymore. But he still works on Mason, and still uses it -- as a frontend to other frameworks. So you're absolutely right :)

Re:A decade too late.

[arodland]

If I'm programming in Python, then I'm not programming in Perl.

Bullshit. If you only have room in your brain for one language, then you're a shit programmer and no one cares what you think. :)

Re:A decade too late.

[wiredlogic]

Perl doesn't really need that so much as it needs all the cruft cleaned out. That should have been provided long ago.

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

... and replaced with? Look at the Perl 6 RFCs and make something coherent out of them. If you can pull it off in less time than it took the Perl 6 designers, you deserve a Fields medal.

Re:A decade too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

You say, 'The answer is largely the same, "we were stuck with it".'

This all happened in your head I think. I love the way you extrapolate the experience of one or two interviews to imply an attitude for the community at large.

I guess all those CPAN modules also got written because the authors were "stuck with it" too.

There is no insight in your waffle.

Re:A decade too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you mock perl6 or comment about how Ruby and Phython make Perl irrelevent at least read the Wikipedia entry for Perl 6 and understand what pardigrams are actually being brought to the table so that you can at least mock it intelligently.

Everyone in house who has taken to the time to understand what P6 is about has been blown away by the concepts and capabilities. Don't be a lemming and don't poopoo shit from a position of ignorance.

Re:A decade too late.

[aynoknman]

How can it be too late? It came out before Christmas, just like Larry promised.

Re:A decade too late.

[lena_10326]

Yes. We all understand the difference between front end / back end. Let's keep n00b tutorials out of this. 2 years ago means you weren't around for the on-going migration to garupa.

Re:A decade too late.

[dolmen.fr]

I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins. That's certainly where I've seen the language most widely used.

Perl 6 has the powerful features that will make it a top general purpose language because of the improved productivity of the programmer. It is a major break in the Perl's history. It drops Perl 5's legacies and introduces tens of features that no other programming language has.

Re:A decade too late.

[DuckDodgers]

I work in Java web development and have toyed with Perl, PHP, and Ruby. I have another guess as to why the interviews are different.

Java is a very verbose language and of course it has a compilation step from source code to the Java Virtual Machine byte code. If you manage the configuration of your Java library inside Java code, either in production or during development, it is a real hassle. In most cases when you have to modify the code - possibly a lot for a relatively small change - you have to recompile it, and restart your application or at least reload your application on the application server. To get around this language verbosity, lots of Java toolkits put configuration data in XML files and code annotations. Or in the case of JSP, they created a syntactically different markup language instead of using raw Java for displaying data in the page. For build tools, the popular ones like Ant and Maven also have their own XML syntax. Of course, once you're using XML and annotations and JSTL in your JSP you lose the use of a lot of the code-completion and method lookup tools that make developing code in plain Java easy. And the different Java libraries and frameworks don't use uniform configuration conventions or markup language syntax either.

By contrast, at least for web development the Perl, PHP, and Ruby toolkits I've seen manage their configuration in the source code and their build tools and page markup is very similar to the language itself. So if you're working on a Perl web application and you can read Perl, you can pretty quickly get up to speed on the CPAN modules in the application. If you're working on Ruby and you are familiar with Ruby, you can pretty quickly get up to speed on ActiveRecord or whatever. In many cases changes to the configuration are detected immediately and applied automatically. Even if they aren't, restarting your application is fast because there is no intermediate compilation step.

So I presume that an interviewer hiring a candidate for Ruby, PHP, Perl, or Python would focus most on general knowledge and expertise with the language itself. If you know the language well, learning a toolkit or page markup language or build tool or whatever is straightforward. By contrast, in the Java world high skill with Java itself does not automatically translate to expertise with Ant, Maven, JSP, Spring, Hibernate, JPA, Struts, Tapestry, Wicket, JSF, etc.... I inherited a Hibernate heavy application when I got my first Java job. Going from C++ to Java took me a few weeks. Learning Hibernate and how to configure it properly took me a lot longer.

Re:A decade too late.

[DuckDodgers]

I don't think any of the features in Perl 6 are new really. But I think it's more reasonable to argue that no other single programming language has all of Perl 6's features or even most of them.

Re:A decade too late.

[CAIMLAS]

Sysadmin here: and yes, a bit late to the game. Perl is, absolutely, a sysadmin thing.

For me, it's replaced bash and other 'common' shell scripting. Why? Simply: it's better and cross-platform, whereas "shell" is not.

With shell, I've got to contend with competing and contrary system binaries, which for any reasonably complex task, I'm going to use: grep, find, ls, sed, and so on. That makes things frustratingly difficult when you use multiple systems.

With perl, I don't worry about that because the problem doesn't exist. Not only that, but my script can be a third (or less) in length, do more, and be reasonably less complex. Perl is on pretty damn near every UNIX system made these days by default (much more likely than a common sh), and is trivial to add to a Windows machine (which is, sadly, the only place where your assumptions fall through with perl).

Contrarily, are you using ash, bash, sh, ksh, csh, zsh, etc. for your shell scripting? GNU, BSD, Solaris, AIX, etc. binaries for complex functionality? Some of this can be mitigated by throwing GNU utilities and a common shell on every system you use, but then you're stuck doing that, and there's significant maintenance overhead in doing so.

I'm frankly not looking forward to perl 6: I think that, if it gets any adoption, it'll fragment the perl community. It's divergent enough from perl that it should not be called perl, at this point.

THough, there are a couple (ok, one I'm aware of) MVC frameworks written in perl which is reportedly very good - catalyst. But for my time and money, I'd rather use something else at this point.

Re:A decade too late.

[CAIMLAS]

A few years back I was browsing through job listings for perl positions and not surprisingly there weren't many.

Did you look for 'shell scripting'? Because many managers don't know the difference, equating them with each other. Sysadmin work is the domain of perl.

Re:A decade too late.

[Just Some Guy]

Did you know that the top Perl books sold still outpace the top Ruby and Rails books sold?

I've bought and consumed a few copies of "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl", mainly because that's the only way I could get through some of the trickier parts of the language. I've not bought a language book since then because more recent competitors (specifically Python) were so much easier to learn that I never needed any.

And no, it's not like Perl was the first language I ever learned so that picking up a second language was much easier. To this day, if it's been more than a month since I've had to maintiain Perl code, I can hardly remember the right combination of sigils to pass around data structures without looking them up.

I'd also add that the dilution of Ruby, Python, Java, etc. books would account for a lot of the lower average sales. Of course "Programming Perl" was a huge seller; it didn't have any major competition for ages, and it's still considered the de facto reference. I'm not sure of anything outside "Programming Python" that's nearly so canonical for other languages.

Re:A decade too late.

[jeremyp]

Nobody gives a flying fuck.

Perl's strength has always been that it is a really good scripting language. All this pseudo theoretical computer scientific bollocks holds no interest for the average person doing scripting. They don't care if the language can do interfaces (which is what roles are) as long as they can parse this really complex text file into a sensible set of fields. And they could do that already with Perl 5.

If you want a "proper" language, there's already Python and Ruby in the same space. Perl 6 has missed the boat.

Re:A decade too late.

[jeremyp]

That isn't what he said. Do you understand the difference between programming in two languages at once and knowing two languages at once?

Re:A decade too late.

[chromatic]

All this pseudo theoretical computer scientific bollocks holds no interest for the average person doing scripting.

Said "average person" was happy with a language which didn't use functions, which didn't use objects, which didn't use lexical scoping, which didn't use garbage collection, which didn't use JIT, which didn't have easy deployment, which didn't have libraries for network programming, which... well, sometimes the state of the art advances, and the average person could be a little bit more productive and write a little bit better code with a better tool.

Note, for example, that Ruby and Python have builtin regular expressions, their own library management systems inspired by the CPAN, and their own implementations of roles (of which I hear the authors of the Smalltalk traits paper have since suggested that statefulness is a virtue). Maybe they'll even get lexical scoping working one of these years.

Can they...

[Ancient_Hacker]

Can they bundle it with a copy of ( insert your favorite vaporware here )..???

Re:Can they...

[Cro Magnon]

Well, I am rewriting Duke Nukem Forever in Perl 6, so I can port it to the Hurd.

Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me be the first to say "congratulations!" to the Rakudo team. This is great news and an important milestone.

Let me be the first to congratulate

[Anonymous Coward]

$$][/^&]l/:^$& :&}::*'%'''^';^;

(To prove my point, the Perl that powers Slashdot told me I hit the junk filter. The ironing is delicious.)

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[betterunixthanunix]

And people wonder why they show ridiculous looking code that consists of special characters arranged in weird ways in movies...

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[siddesu]

well, it _is_ junk, at least from the point of view of the interpreter.

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[Surt]

Personally, I found that the ironing left my tongue without any functional taste buds.

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[SanityInAnarchy]

You know, that would be great if it was actually executable, and I've seen worse-looking intentionally-obfuscated Perl.

Unfortunately, it isn't actually executable, at least as far as I can tell.

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[Anonymous Coward]

With Perl it's all the same!

Re:Let me be the first to congratulate

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this one in shell:
:(){ :|:& };:

Welcome Rakudo Star

[chromatic]

The Welcome Rakudo Star post on the new Perl.com explains some of the motivations for the Star releases and why this is such a big milestone for all of Perl.

Does anyone care?

[h890231398021]

Seriously. What if a complete, bug-free Perl 6 implementation were released today (as opposed to the "early" version described in TFA)? Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6? Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5? Really, would anyone except the most diehard Perl addicts even notice or care about Perl 6?

Re:Does anyone care?

[betterunixthanunix]

Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too. Perl may not be trendy anymore, but I am sure that there are still people writing new applications in Perl.

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

More computers are available in the hands of more people today than at any other time in recorded human history. More novice programmers exist now than at any other time in recorded human history. What worry about sheep stealing from other languages (as if programmers or novices can only ever use or learn a single language at a time) when hundreds of millions of people could write useful programs?

Re:Does anyone care?

[John Betonschaar]

I wondering the same thing. I can imagine there's still loads of perl 5 around that is actively maintained and extended, and in some ways I can even understand some people still like perl because they can get stuff done fast. But who in their right mind would invest time an effort learning and using perl 6 nowadays, now that there are a zillion alternatives that are much more mature and much less crippled by the perl heritage that 6 will probably have to carry around?

Disclaimer: I absolutely hate everything about perl anyway and have never understood why anyone would ever like it. So I'm probably not the most objective person to judge perl 6 ;-)

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

I absolutely hate everything about perl anyway and have never understood why anyone would ever like it.

It's flexible, powerful, and easy to extend. 84,296 modules are freely available from the CPAN (at least when I checked; the upload rate is staggering). It has an immense culture of quality and testing. It's amazingly portable. It scales from the freshest novice writing baby Perl to large-scale applications which must not fail, written by experienced professionals. It's malleable; you can program in a compiler-checked subset of the language or express yourself in the most clear or (if you don't care about maintainability) the most expressive, creative way possible.

It has amazing libraries for network access and databases. It sets the standard for text processing. It's been an integral part of usable Unix installations for years. You can find it just about everywhere, and you can do just about anything with it.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Waffle Iron]

Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too.

Well, Python 3 is pretty much just the same old Python with some nifty new features added and a couple of long-deprecated "mistakes" removed. Perl6, OTOH, is almost a completely different language from Perl5. People are going to have a bit of a learning curve if they're planning on transitioning to this new version.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Surt]

More computers are available in the hands of more people today than at any other time in recorded human history. More novice programmers exist now than at any other time in recorded human history. What worry about sheep stealing from other languages (as if programmers or novices can only ever use or learn a single language at a time) when hundreds of millions of people could write useful programs?

In Perl? L O L.

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

L O L

A subtle but scathing point! I apologize and amend my comment: hundreds of millions of literate people could write useful programs.

Re:Does anyone care?

[DragonWriter]

Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5?

Yes. Look, I mostly prefer Ruby out of the trio of Ruby/Python/Perl, with Python a close second, but Perl obviously has an active community and there are obviously quite a lot of people interested in Perl 6.

Yeah, in some ways its a big change from Perl 5 and there is going to be some time for people to hop on board (just as with Python 2.x to Python 3 and Ruby 1.8.x to Ruby 1.9.x) and sure, some people might prefer Python or Ruby to Perl (just as some people prefer Python or Perl to Ruby, and some people prefer Ruby or Perl to Python.)

Why do people insist on thinking that if they don't prefer something, no one else in the world is interested in it?

Re:Does anyone care?

[rduke15]

No mod points, so all I can say is that I totally agree. I suppose the people who hate Perl are the same sort of people who this quote refers to:

many Computer Scientists have come out in opposition to the Art of Programming. In trying to make programming predictable, they've mostly succeeded in making it boring. And in so doing, they've lost sight of the idea that programming is a human pursuit. They've designed languages intended more to keep the computer happy than the programmer.

For anyone who doesn't know Perl and wonders what other people like so much about it, I think the interview linked to above is worth reading.

Re:Does anyone care?

[ddvlad]

It's flexible, powerful, and easy to extend. 84,296 modules are freely available from the CPAN (at least when I checked; the upload rate is staggering). It has an immense culture of quality and testing. It's amazingly portable. It scales from the freshest novice writing baby Perl to large-scale applications which must not fail, written by experienced professionals. It's malleable; you can program in a compiler-checked subset of the language or express yourself in the most clear or (if you don't care about maintainability) the most expressive, creative way possible.

It has amazing libraries for network access and databases. It sets the standard for text processing. It's been an integral part of usable Unix installations for years. You can find it just about everywhere, and you can do just about anything with it.

Hey, what the hell, man? Wasn't, like, everyone bashing Perl? Just kidding, of course. My limited experience with Perl is "Wow, seriously? That easy?" after hours of gazing at code and docs.

Re:Does anyone care?

[jjohnson]

Without disputing anything you say, how is this different from PHP, Python, or Ruby? Is there a reasonable chance that Perl 6 will regain the ground it lost to those competitors when it languished under Larry Wall's negligent stewardship?

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

Only Python comes close to having anything resembling Perl's level of testing. (Ruby's improved a lot thanks to Rubinius, but to my knowledge the latest stable releases don't include test suites.) PHP's testing was abysmal, last I checked.

None of those languages have anything like the CPAN, despite saying for years "We should build something like the CPAN."

None of those languages are as malleable as Perl 5; see MooseX::Declare for example, or even Moose.

PHP is still easier to deploy for web programs than Perl. Python has an advantage with GAE, and I understand Ruby has something called Heroku.

... when it languished under Larry Wall's negligent stewardship?

Healthy communities flourish from the healthy interactions between and cooperation of many individuals. If you thought Larry's job was to make sure that everyone is happy and doing exactly what he thinks they should do, you've never understood Larry or the Perl community.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Blakey Rat]

The only app I use on a regular basis written in Perl is... Slashdot. And it's a gigantic piece of buggy crap. Not a very good ambassador you have there. :)

Re:Does anyone care?

[Raenex]

In Perl? L O L.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is indentation-based scoping one of the fixed mistakes?

(making sure anon checkbox is on)

Re:Does anyone care?

[Raenex]

[L. Wall]: They've designed languages intended more to keep the computer happy than the programmer.

The problem is that programming in Perl quite often is not a happy experience for the programmer. Too much magic. Too much line noise. I do admit, though, that there's a quite useful subset of Perl that is fun to program in -- for scripts, anyways. Anything larger that benefits from data structures gets to be a mess, fast.

Re:Does anyone care?

[jjohnson]

None of those languages have anything like the CPAN

CPAN is overrated. Those 85,000 modules contain duplicates, inconsistent coding standards and interfaces, and cover a wide variety of things I just don't care about. And the last time I looked at CPAN for something, in 2000, it was pure frustration to me.

What I have in PHP (which I'll happily stipulate is a kidney stone of a language) is Drupal, which offers, for web stuff, a relatively clean and complete framework that I can use for 90% of what I want to do. In other words, the stuff that you get with PHP like Drupal is real-world stuff that I can make money working with and actually covers the largest amount of common use-cases.

None of those languages are as malleable as Perl 5

Malleability is overrated. I don't view every programming task as an opportunity to discover a new and unique way to accomplish something. I'd say Python actually wins in this regard: there's usually a right way to do something, which means that there's a body of stable practice from which you can diverge if you want to, but don't have to. You've got guidance. However, if pure flexibility is your thing, you've got Ruby.

If you thought Larry's job was to make sure that everyone is happy and doing exactly what he thinks they should do, you've never understood Larry or the Perl community.

I thought Larry's job was to provide a certain amount of leadership and direction that kept the community reasonably focussed on releasing something useful, rather than take a 10 year sabbatical discussing something that wins vaporware awards.

Re:Does anyone care?

[ignavusinfo]

None of those languages have anything like the CPAN, despite saying for years "We should build something like the CPAN."

If this were the only true assertion you made (and it's not) it's reason enough to seriously consider Perl. I'd love to use Ruby more (it's a fun language, I like the OO, distributed and multithreaded programs are easy to write) but the libraries are lacking (as is easy library management).

Makes you figure there's a reason (La)TeX is still popular too, huh?

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

Makes you figure there's a reason (La)TeX is still popular too, huh?

I see it this way: you get deployment right, you get ease of getting your first task done right, or you get libraries right. If you don't get any of those right, you get to work on screencasts.

Re:Does anyone care?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Perl6, OTOH, is almost a completely different language from Perl5

So you've never known anyone to learn and work in two similar languages? Personally, perl 5 is my staple tool for developing data and text processing applications at work. However, I also do a lot of hacking in Python and sh (including heavy use of sed, awk, and grep) because, well, they are sometimes more convenient to work in for different things. Just because they are similar, but different, doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't bother learning them all.

When it comes to perl 6, I realize that it is basically a different language than perl 5. That said, I will continue to program and maintain my work in perl 5 where it makes sense to do so. However, the driving reason that I use perl 5 as my primary language is the general philosophy displayed by the language. The overall quirkiness and linguistics-centric nature of the language make it both enjoyable and interesting to work in, for me. I am wagering that the designers of perl 6 tried to keep some of the perl 5 cultural and philosophical elements of the language when writing the new language (at least it sounds like they did based on what I've read so far). That said, I intend to start learning perl 6 slowly, and trying out some new stuff with them just like when I picked up perl 5 the first time. If I like it and find a use for it, I will keep learning both perl 5 and perl 6. If, however, I decide that it is clunky, does not get done what I need it to get done, and is an all around pain in the ass to work with, I will probably just stick with perl 5.

So the moral of the story is: Yes, it is new and different. That doesn't mean it's bad. It might be totally awesome like Perl 5 was (for me). So Perl 5 coders may as well try it out and see what they think.

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

I am wagering that the designers of perl 6 tried to keep some of the perl 5 cultural and philosophical elements of the language when writing the new language (at least it sounds like they did based on what I've read so far).

The first time I wrote any serious code in Perl 6 (five years ago), I had to look up a few pieces of unfamiliar syntax, but the whole experience felt very comfortable. Perl 5 and Perl 6 share the same essence, the same perlishness.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Junta]

If I have even a pretty sophisticated script written for perl 5.6, it will almost certainly work exactly the same in perl 5.10, even if I make use of CPAN sourced content. If I write a complex script for python 2.3, python 2.7 is likely to break it. As a community/implementation, python has a goal of providing what they feel the best experience at the time is, even if it means script authors have to pay a significant maintenance price to keep up. In Perl, the development is a lot more conservative, being very careful to avoid changing existing behavior even if it means an interface that was designed poorly in the first place gets the intuitive name/functions and the better implementation has to settle for a slightly odd naming convention to coexist without breaking scripts in the while.

Python might have matured by now (haven't kept track), but back in the day, Perl::DBI provided an *extremely* consistent DB abstraction, whereas the python database access varied greatly from one DB to another.

At the end of the day, any language can be used to do whatever generally, it's mostly a matter of taste and deciding which communities most closely aligns with the tradeoffs you think best.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

More computers are available in the hands of more people today than at any other time in recorded human history.

What? Really? Are you SURE about that?

And after such a moronic BGO delivered with such breathless drama, you still got modded up?

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

Are you SURE about that?

Depending on who built the pyramids and how you interpret that strange passage in the Book of the Dead, yes. I realize that interpreting reports such as those from Gartner which suggest that the billion-plus personal computers in use now will become two-billion by 2014 requires similar skills, but those are the best numbers I've seen. (I've seen other suggestions that the number of personal computers available has averaged 12% annual growth over the past few years.) Do you have other statistics?

Re:Does anyone care?

[Matt Perry]

84,296 modules are freely available from the CPAN

I find this to be Perl's killer feature. I've rarely encountered a situation where there wasn't a module to make something easier for facilitate interfacing with something.

Re:Does anyone care?

[dAzED1]

Is there a reasonable chance that Perl 6 will regain the ground it lost to those competitors when it languished under Larry Wall's negligent stewardship?

err...so, riddle me how the person who created it was negligent? If the community wanted X to happen, it was all open. You could, at the very least, specify that he was a bit lax in the last several years...the word "recently" might make sense before "negligent" there.

Re:Does anyone care?

[turbidostato]

"Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too."

Apple to oranges. I have no doubt that Perl 5 scripts will be written long after Perl 6 hits "stable". But I do too think that Perl 6 day was five/six years ago or never.

I myself come from the sysadmin camp (and on the develoment side that means "apprentice of everything, master of nothing") so I hacked together my fair share of Perl rubish as well as Bash or C -and the more I went into Perl, the less I needed to program in C, except for some low level or in need for speed hacks. Latter it came PHP for fast web-facing rubish replacing C or Perl CGI's because it brought better bang for the buck on this field. After that it was again Perl the one that payed the price on the "pure systems" side being progressively substituted by Python and (ironically) a bit more of Bash because, again, it brings more bang for the buck (OOP, relatively nice syntax, quite a lot of companion libraries... and Bash -not Perl, for the really simple things). Now, given the time I put into Python, probably PHP will go out of my belt for web-facing dirty hacks and I'll use instead Python plus some framework (probably Turbo Gears as of today).

Sincerily I don't see how Perl 6 will give me benefit enough to look for a(nother) change unless it brings with him another "soft" revolution (right now I had to go with some Ruby, basically against my will, in order to support Redmine and Puppet but I don't see myself getting more time to Ruby than the strictly necessary and not for "internal" new developments -same with Perl 6 while, certainly, time will say).

Re:Does anyone care?

[turbidostato]

"Without disputing anything you say, how is this different from PHP, Python, or Ruby?"

They offered somehting smelling "new" and the ability to do something percieved as "new" at the time of their (percieved) birth: PHP brougth web development to the masses; Python brought "modern" programming paradigms to the masses; Ruby brought web frameworks to the masses.

What is the "new with a new name" that Perl 6 will bring to the masses? Remember that specially regarding mass adoption it doesn't need to do so much with facts as with perceptions.

Re:Does anyone care?

[trwww]

> Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6?

Perl 6 isn't a replacement for Perl 5 in the sense that Perl 5 was for Perl 4.

I've got plenty of uses for p6, but I'm sure I'll continue to use p5 for the rest of my life.

Re:Does anyone care?

[trwww]

CPAN is overrated.

A customer came to me with an outlook express email database that needed parsed. 15 minutes later I had this stub working:

use Mail::Box::Dbx;
my $dbx = Mail::Box::Dbx->new(folder => 'c:/path/to/database.dbx');
foreach my $mid ( $dbx->messageIds ) {
my $message = $dbx->find($mid);
print $message->subject, "\n";
}

I looked around and no other language has anything like this.

Re:Does anyone care?

[jjn1056]

There definitely are: http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

And thats just those written in Catalyst (a Perl MVC web development framework). Thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt?

Re:Does anyone care?

[jjn1056]

Thank you for giving us, the Perl community, the benefit of the doubt. The world is big, and there's lots of room for intelligent people to have rationally based differences.

Re:Does anyone care?

[murr]

The problem is that programming in Perl quite often is not a happy experience for the programmer. Too much magic. Too much line noise.

From the Perl 6 examples I've seen so far, the Perl 6 solution to this seems to be—more magic, and more line noise.

Re:Does anyone care?

[cecom]

Ha - ha, come on. Last time I checked, Python 3 was released in 2008 and already has a couple of maintenance releases under its belt. Comparing that to Perl 6 is silly :-). That says nothing about the relative merits of either language or its implementation, but it is obvious to an objective observer that Perl 6 missed the boat in terms of mind share and relevance.

Re:Does anyone care?

[unity]

"I looked around and no other language has anything like this"
c#: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/DBXParser.aspx
using (DBX DBX = new DBX())
{
int count = DBX.Parse(@"test.dbx"); //specify your DBX file here
if (count > 0)
{
for (int i = 0; i {
DBX.Extract(i, (i + 1) + ".eml"); //specify file to extract to
//or just read the content to memory
//string content = DBX.Extract(i);
}
}
}

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

*rolls eyes*

hmmm... who's holding the clue by six? chromatic? This guy needs it applied, please, hard, before he procreates. He hasn't seen a line of good Perl code in the last four years, apparently.

And believe me, even this guy could write literate Perl if you beat him hard enough.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only Python comes close to having anything resembling Perl's level of testing.

[citation needed]

Re:Does anyone care?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Only Python comes close to having anything resembling Perl's level of testing.

If only Python would abandon the code blocking through indentation and add something similar to Perl's "use strict".

Sure people will expound on the benefits of forced indentation, but I'm old enough to have lived through Fortran 77 and I thought we've moved past positional requirements of source code.

I can live with the indentation, but I would really really like the "use strict" functionality. This way Python doesn't assume that my typo was meant to be a new variable.

Yes these are personally preferences...

Re:Does anyone care?

[metamatic]

Only Python comes close to having anything resembling Perl's level of testing. (Ruby's improved a lot thanks to Rubinius, but to my knowledge the latest stable releases don't include test suites.)

All stable Ruby releases include a test suite.

None of those languages have anything like the CPAN, despite saying for years "We should build something like the CPAN."

Ruby has RubyGems, which is very like CPAN. (Speaking as an ex-Perl programmer.)

None of those languages are as malleable as Perl 5

I don't want malleable. When every package I download has a different syntax for using its objects and a completely different code style, that's not a benefit to me. I have a job to do, and frankly, Ruby is still too malleable and too prone to people being clever.

I gave up on Perl when I saw that Perl 6 was going to be even more syntaxy and complicated than Perl 5. Larry steered it the wrong way, in my view, so I switched to Ruby.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that programming in Perl quite often is not a happy experience for the programmer. Too much magic. Too much line noise.

You probably mean "not a happy experience for the programmer who hasn't used Perl for more than a week".

"Too much magic" is just code for "I haven't gotten into the language and the way it works yet", and "too much line noise" just means "I'm not familiar with its syntax yet".

Seriously, do you think that if I showed a random program in, say, C and a random program in Perl (5 or 6) to people who don't know ANY programming language yet (such as my parents), they would think of C as good and wholesome and natural, but not Perl? If yes, think again. In fact, I'm pretty sure the opposite would be true: at least in Perl, you don't have to worry about pointers and memory allocation and bounds checking and buffer overruns, so you can focus on your actual problem instead.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Raenex]

You probably mean "not a happy experience for the programmer who hasn't used Perl for more than a week".

No, I don't. I've used Perl 5 for over 10 years. Not so much these days, but I still break it out when I want to parse something in a while(<>) loop, or script some web downloads, as examples.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, the layout rule of python is one of the least interesting things about the language. It's not something I got to love, and I don't go around extolling its virtues, it's simply something I barely ever notice whenever I write Python these days.

What I really do wish for, yes, is a "use strict". Everyone points me at pychecker, but I then point out that it's not built in to the compiler, and python for all its crazy flexibility in its object model, *deliberately* doesn't allow its parser or compiler to be hooked that way.

What I also wish from the python community is an IRC presence that isn't so insufferably smug and dogmatic about, well, everything. Just mention threads in any context whatsoever sometime on freenode #python and you'll see what I mean. If perl does something one way, it must be bad. If Java does it some way, that too must be bad, because Java Is Enterprisey. Four legs good, two legs baaaad. There's a streak of profound anti-intellectualism running through the most visible segments of the python community, and it's one that you don't see in perl or java communities (I long ago wrote off the PHP community and I don't know much about Ruby to judge)

Re:Does anyone care?

[trwww]

Kind of so obvious the a MS only solution is going to have this that I didnt think it needed mentioned.

I was talking about between PHP, perl, ruby, and python that perl was the only language that can do this out of the box on any platform.

Re:Does anyone care?

[unity]

Well you did say "no other language".

Also, the c# solution I linked to is really basic, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't run on Mono --it doesn't require any .dlls or windows components-- which would make it not a MS-only solution.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the last time I looked at CPAN for something, in 2000, it was pure frustration to me.

Criticisms of something you haven't used in ten years are not valid.

Re:Does anyone care?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's not true for ruby. They love test-driven development and the Ruby language is REALLY malleable as well ! Just look at the way rails is done!

I use ruby everyday at work, and it's not because of heroku! :) (actually I don't really like webdev!)
Oh and they do have something like CPAN. I've used perl for years and I simply prefer ruby now, and rubygems is pretty awesome. Don't know what you mean by "we should build something like the CPAN." ??? For me it's already done.

Re:Does anyone care?

[chromatic]

I'll take gems and the claims of "Ruby loves testing!" more seriously when gem tests run before installation.

Perl is COBOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl is COBOL. If you can deal with it without getting sick, there's some steady jobs out there. That's it. Stick a fork in it. It's done.

Re:github is a trap

[Sir_Lewk]

Github most certainly has free accounts. What paid accounts gets you is the ability to make private repos. Why would anyone interested in Freedom need that?

Great part of Git is that it's distributed. Even if github was a trap, you could escape with exactly zero effort.

Huge!

[e2d2]

This is going to be huge! Every application that comes out for the next 10 years will use this I predict.

Just an FYI: I eat paint chips.

What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll save you the trip to Google/Wikipedia: Perl was an important language back in the dot-com frenzy. It is a script language which is known for making programmers produce highly effective but unreadable and thus unmaintainable code. It's success largely stemmed from an implementation of regular expressions. The Perl regex syntax has since been adopted by countless tools and languages. Perl is like 8-bit computer emulators: Important for preserving the heritage, but you wouldn't start anything new with it.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[chromatic]

... but you wouldn't start anything new with it.

My business does just fine starting new things in Perl, and I'm by no means alone in that.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[betterunixthanunix]

Perl is still a great language for processing text, and plenty of people are still writing new Perl programs. The main reason Perl is not trendy anymore is that its strength, text processing, is not as relevant to the trendy programming styles use in webdev these days. Perl's syntax is weird and lends itself to unreadable code, sure, but I have seen horrible code in a lot of other languages and programming models.

There are still plenty of text processing tasks to be done, and Perl is still strong for those tasks.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[jjohnson]

It's success largely stemmed from an implementation of regular expressions.

And the absence of comparably useful alternatives, something that's no longer the case.

I would be interested in seeing a competitive analysis between Perl 6, Python, Ruby, and PHP for performance and features. My suspicion is that Perl 6, even if it delivers everything it promises, will still fall behind the others, or not be significantly ahead enough to tempt large scale switching from them back to Perl.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[phantomfive]

I don't know, there are always drawbacks. Python is too inflexible. PHP is inconsistent, opens you up to security flaws, and isn't very good for large projects. Ruby is great but only has a small community backing it and has scaleability issues. J2EE is infinitely scaleable but has a gigantic learning curve, the number of large subsections seem infinite as well. Some people are going to disagree with parts of the flamebait I just spewed, but each of those languages have that reputation, even if it's not 100% earned, and there is definitely room for improvement and innovation in the web-programming world. So it is possible that a new, interesting language and framework could come to the fore in the web programming world.

One thing is for sure, Perl 6 is going to have a dedicated community set to building up and promoting a web framework to go along with the language. Whether the language becomes commonplace on the web or not depends on how well the framework is written, how good the language actually is, and (as you mentioned) if performance is adequate.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[steelfood]

Maintaining them, on the other hand, is orthogonally related.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why all the computational linguistics folks are using Python.

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl falling behind PHP? Ha!

Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl's syntax is weird and lends itself to unreadable code, sure, but I have seen horrible code in a lot of other languages and programming models.

So, because you can do bad code in a language, that said language is bad too? What a stupid statement. Perl FORCES you to write unreadable stuff, which is why some people hate it. Said otherwise: you can write unreadable things in Python, PHP and others, but you don't HAVE to.

News Forecasting

[BJ_Covert_Action]

So does this mean tomorrow's headlines be about:

A) A total stock market crash?
B) The unintentional creation of a true, maniacal AI?
C) The Singularity?
D) The decoding and translation of the Voynich manuscript?
E) A /b/ tard winning the Nobel Prize?
F) All of the above?

Re:News Forecasting

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha! In all fairness, teaching a nigger how to read is pretty impressive. Maybe someday, niggers will learn to speak English without a teleprompter.

Re:News Forecasting

[jjn1056]

I guess tomorrow will be like most others, I'll go to work and get well paid to write Perl.

Re:github is a trap

[betterunixthanunix]

The GPL does not require you to make your changes public, stop spreading the FUD. You are free to keep your changes private, just as much as you are free to do so with the BSD and MIT licenses. The only difference is that the GPL requires you to make the source code available to everyone you give the program to under the same license. You are not required to distribute your program to anyone, you are only required to follow certain rules if you do distribute your program.

I must have been misinformed.

[pushing-robot]

I'd heard that Visual C# killed Rakudo Star.

Re:I must have been misinformed.

[uslurper]

I'd heard that Visual C# killed Rakudo Star.

/facepalm

Re:I must have been misinformed.

[ctchristmas]

I heard Rakudo Star was dead before C# got the chance.

Re:I've had the book since 2004

[rduke15]

Is it this book which is included?

Perl 6 introduction?

[moonbender]

Anybody know of a well-written, up-to-date Perl 6 introduction? That is, an introduction to the Perl 6 feature, not a programming tutorial. There are many resources about Perl 6, it's difficult to know which one is worth reading and which is outdated. Even if it doesn't take off, it seems that Perl 6 brings enough new and interesting concepts to the table that it's worth reading about.

Re:Perl 6 introduction?

[chromatic]

Rakudo Star includes a PDF of the Perl 6 introduction book; the print version should come out late next month. Moritz Lenz's Perl 5 to 6 article series is always informative and useful. The official Perl 6 site's documentation page links to current and accurate documentation.

Re:Perl 6 introduction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, thanks for these links, chromatic.

I hope there'll be a Camel book for Perl 6 once things settle down and the language (and its implementation(s)) become stable!

Re:Perl 6 introduction?

[chromatic]

Larry and Damian have worked on outlines and have proposed various timelines for Programming Perl 6, but I don't know its current status. My company, Onyx Neon, has other Perl 6 books in process.

Re:Perl 6 introduction?

[moonbender]

Thanks, the Perl 5 to 6 series were exactly what I was looking for. I've read through pretty much all of them now, very interesting. I think after using Perl6 for a while it would be pretty hard going back to Java and C++.

"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to brush up on what other languages are offering if you think those "features" are "amazing".

Perl 6's "roles" are merely interfaces, which even Java has had since the very beginning. They're significantly less powerful than Haskell's typeclasses.

"Grammars" is very similar to the pattern matching you see in languages like Haskell, SML and even Scala.

Perl 6's "constraints" are significantly less powerful and less flexible than the pattern guards of Haskell.

"Multidispatch" has been offered by Common Lisp's CLOS system for many, many years now. Haskell's polymorphism is far more flexible than Perl 6's multidispatch support.

"Autothreading hyperoperator"-like functionality has been offered by the GHC Haskell compiler for a long time now. Hell, we could even do the same years ago with collection classes written in C++, where we'd override certain operators to spawn threads and process different parts of the collection simultaneously.

Just about every "benefit" of Perl 6 is something that Haskell alone has offered in a usable form for years, if not decades.

Why all the Perl-bashing?

[acid06]

It seems like the current way to be hip in developer circles is to make fun of Perl.

I really want to understand this phenomenon as I doubt most of these people bashing Perl have never even seen any Perl code written in the last 4 years. Hell, I could bet that a lot of people have never seen any *real* Perl code at all.

Perl 5 is a modern language which has the features of other currently more trendy dynamic languages and more. We have modern web frameworks. We have robust database bindings and state-of-the-art ORM libraries. We have have a well-tested modern object-system with optional declarative syntax. Perl is used by several high profile sites which, at this point, everyone already knows (BBC, DuckDuckGo, Slashdot, etc).

Perl 6 is a different language but shares a lot of the common minds behind all these awesome Perl 5 tools. However, even if you don't like Perl 5 for whatever reason keep in mind that Rakudo Star is a completely different thing (as a matter of fact, the name "Perl 6" should probably be dropped in favor of Rakudo - to avoid all this cargo-cult).

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[PerfectionLost]

It seems like the current way to be hip in developer circles is to make fun of Perl.

Yea seriously. This is taking away from solid time we could spend bashing COBOL.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[jjohnson]

It's not hip to bash Perl these days, it's actually a sign of old-fogeyism.

There's a lot of pent-up irritation with Perl. It comes from the fact that a large number of us started with Perl, and watched it languish as competitors like PHP and Python and then Ruby ate its community. Then Perl 6 was announced, and Perl loyalism was given a shot in the arm--whee, Perl will evolve and take back its rightful place as king of scripting languages! Then it languished again for more than a decade while the famously squirrelly Larry Wall gave talks on religion and postmodernism in programming. Perl won't die; Perl 6 will find a community. But Perl as king of scripting languages, as the indispensable tool in your toolbox, as the mark of the geek, is a dead letter now, and to anyone who invested a lot in mastering it, that stings a bit.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl is used by several high profile sites [...] Slashdot

...and you don't see what the Perl-bashing is about? A site with plenty long-lived and highly visible bugs is on the short list of well known back ends written in Perl. If that doesn't scream "unmaintainable," then what does?

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[chromatic]

If that doesn't scream "unmaintainable," then what does?

Given Rob Malda's well known attention to detail and demands for perfection, I'm not sure the choice of implementation language is the biggest target.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[hercubus]

It seems like the current way to be hip in developer circles is to make fun of Perl.

You have to remember that most developers are, on the inside, insecure teenage girlie-men living in someone's basement.

The Java kiddies (circa 1999) would say things like -- "What, like C++? That is so five minutes ago. God, you are so, like, old!" And I believed them at the time.

And before the Java kiddies there were the UNIX kiddies knocking Fortran and COBOL, and before that assembler programmers made fun of the old guys that didn't code algorithms, they _built_ algorithms out of tubes and wires.

Every new generation makes fun of the previous. It's not unique to development, we just have really short generations. Today's cutting edge will be out of date in five years, laughable in ten years. Or cut those numbers in half - whatever.

So it goes. Carry on you young whipper-snappers, have fun with your VMs and GCs and DSLs. Get all XP and Agile and whatever-the-hell with your not-so-bad-selves, just remember to use SOAP and don't play with your WSDLs (I'm looking at you, Kumar).

I'm going back to my PL/SQL, coding transactions the way real men should, tightly coupled to the database. try{catch} this you punks, you ASP-holes! Hah!

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[mystik]

Perl did languish for a while.

Perl6 gave the language dabblers an opportunity to experiment with new ideas and concepts. Take the best of perl5, but not be afraid to be wildly incompatible, and see where it goes.

However, while all the cool kids were doing stuff in perl6, the perl5 folks realized they could do really cool things in perl5 too, right now. Perl5 now has Moose, Plack (Stolen from Ruby's Rack), new web frameworks to match and even better those of ruby, python, and even PHP. Perl5's maintainers started to actually chase down long standing bugs, and actually kill off the things that have been giving deprecation warnings in perl5. There's even a Perl Foundation grant out for someone doing full-time perl5 bug triage + fixing. (And if you've seen Perl5's source, you'll know that's no small feat)

My company's work in perl5 pays my bills. Perl5 is not going anywhere anytime soon, so I'm confident we can continue to move forward with it. Perl6, now that it's becoming more and more usable will inspire the imagination of developers, and continue to evolve, and the perl5 folks will continue to cherry pick the nifty features they can backport into perl5.

It's a very exciting future for perl all around, and I'm happy to be on board.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

When you need a 3rd party download from CPAN to do objects right there is something wrong with your language.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[Frosty Piss]

I doubt most of these people bashing Perl have never even seen any Perl code written in the last 4 years.

Exactly.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[acid06]

Perl has an extensibility philosophy. The very fact that Perl *allows* you to use a different object system illustrates this as few/no other languages allow it.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[jjn1056]

I invested a lot of time mastering Perl, and continue to add to it everyday. I'm not unhappy about that bit at all. I think you get what you give. If you make the effort to be part of the community of Perl, to contribute code, write docs, blogs, anything, like patches or new ideas, you get a lot more out of it. And I get well paid to do it everyday. I'm sorry for those that had a different experience, but if you want to get back to Perl I am open to helping out, feel free to message me.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[thenextstevejobs]

It's not hip to bash Perl these days

I disagree!

I'm a recent graduate. I bet the majority of students, even those in the Linux club, would be hard pressed to write hello world in Perl without Googling. Speaking of, the culture at my school was very dictated by Google, and Google doesn't have much to say about Perl these days.

I don't think I did a single assignment in school which required me to even touch a line of Perl, and we had projects in assembly, C, etc. which I understand some programs these days don't touch so much (and focus on more high level languages, Java, etc.)

The general reaction to "I write a lot of Perl scripts at my internship" during school from peers was basically 'WTF?' followed by questions of how I dealt with the syntax, how hard it is to read, etc. I had the same reaction myself until I was writing a fair number of scripts in it. Even experienced developers at my current job (mostly Ruby shop) who never did much sysadmin stuff tend to have a hugely negative reaction to it.

The flexibility/portability thing is just awesome. It's awesome to be able to jump on just about any UNIX box and have Perl 5 there. With that and a little bash you can get just about anything done on the command line on a system you haven't had a chance to set up to your liking. use strict is great too when the programs get a little larger, though usually that means its time for a different language (if you ask me).

I'm guessing I'll never write a line of code targeted at Perl 6. By the time that is included with bare OSes and such, I'm sure they'll have a Ruby/Python/other language interpreter waiting for me. Or I'll just keep using Perl 5. Ain't broke, and such..

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[ducomputergeek]

We wrote an e-commerce system a few years ago in PHP because when we first started, PHP was available and we were working with a windows host with the goal of someday moving it to *iux. As time went on, it started to become a mess to maintain especially as long standing PHP functions were being deprecated (in our case it was split) and as we grew we knew that we would reach the limit of PostgreSQL. Well, as we started to plan out the next version, it seemed like every time we wanted to add a new feature, there was "already a Perl module" to do it. And our hosting company provides just about every Perl Module worth a crap in it's install (Dedicated servers from Pair Networks). I wrote the initial version of our API in Perl on a sunday afternoon and as we looked to including other databases like Teradata for data warehousing, we found Perl had DBI modules for that, our only option with PHP was ODBC and it's performance was horrible.

I'm from the systems admin background and love my procedural perl, but all the developers are OO guys. I still think that OO Perl is an oxymoron, but with frameworks like catalyst, they can still use their MVC methodology and everyone goes home happy. We're in the middle of building our next version 100% around perl. Perl is robust, well tested, and works. It's just not "sexy" as people say. But I care less about "sexy" and more about building a solution that works today and will likely work years from now.

Those Perl 5 scripts I wrote for basic systems maintanence 10 years ago can be dusted off, change a couple lines to point to the location of perl, and they still work a decade later. I don't think stuff I wrote in php 3 would fair as well.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[psyclone]

What do you mean by the following?

as we grew we knew that we would reach the limit of PostgreSQL

and:

we looked to including other databases like Teradata for data warehousing

How did you reach a "limit" of Postgres? Also, Teradata is built on Postgres.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[Anonymous Coward]

State of the art ORM bindings? DBIx::Class is at version 0.08123. If it's state of the art, why isn't it at least at version 1? Sorry, but ORM solutions like Hibernate or EclipseLink are a lot more advanced than the stuff that's come out of the Perl camp.

I hate to say it, but CPAN is part of Perl's problem. People use it as an upload repository for their crap and call it a contribution to the community. When there's at least four different frameworks for parsing dates and times you realize that "There's more than one way to do it" is another way of saying "completely disorganized, and unwilling to work with one another". Even all of those "Perl6" modules are just going to make things more confusing for people that might be interested in migrating to Perl6.

Re:Why all the Perl-bashing?

[ais523]

print "Hello, World!\n"; # Perl5

say "Hello, World!"; # Perl6

(I'm a CS student, and that was entirely from memory. I might be a bit unusual, though, in that I've worked on relatively large Perl5 applications, for fun, and experimented a bit with Perl6.)

Of course, a Hello, World! is not a very good test of a language (at least one with a relatively sane sort of string constant); it looks much the same in pretty much any scripting language, with only minor syntax differences.

Re:github is a trap

[Brent Taylor]

Taking into account most code is written with the intent of releasing an application to the general population, the previous AC has a point. The freedom to not make your changes public is in fact important.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with the GPL. It's just not for everything. The GPL does in fact require to make your changes public, if you release the application publicly. This isn't a problem with the license mind you. If this is what the original author of the code intended, then the license is working just fine.

I personally find this argument of which license is most "free" (libre or beer) to be an idiotic one. As the author of code, don't pick a license simply because it's most "free". Pick a license based strictly on what you want the end user to be able to do with both the code and binary. End of discussion.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[chromatic]

Perl 6's "roles" are merely interfaces....

Nonsense.

They're significantly less powerful than Haskell's typeclasses.

They're significantly different from Haskell's typeclasses, Haskell being a language which tends to avoid the OO paradigm.

"Grammars" is very similar to the pattern matching you see in languages like Haskell, SML and even Scala.

I've never used SML or Scala. Can you modify the grammar of the language in place?

Perl 6's "constraints" are significantly less powerful and less flexible than the pattern guards of Haskell.

Does Haskell offer parametric pattern guards?

"Multidispatch" has been offered by Common Lisp's CLOS system for many, many years now.

Indeed it has, and no one familiar with languages would claim otherwise.

... where we'd override certain operators...

That process sounds much more manual than Perl 6 hyperoperators.

Just about every "benefit" of Perl 6 is something that Haskell alone has offered in a usable form for years, if not decades.

Even if that were true, so what? (Mature poets steal.) My point was that a hypothetical Perl 6 released in 2001 wouldn't have had those features.

New perl user

[slaxative]

This puts a lot of new users to perl in a bad situation. Start learning Perl 5 syntax or jump to the possibly already sinking ship, Perl 6. Hopefully my camel book will be sufficient to learn both from a basic level.

Re:New perl user

[chromatic]

If you want to explore a new language and don't mind getting your hands dirty (and for the next several releases, reporting a few bugs), Perl 6 can be great fun.

If you have a project in mind you want to deliver as soon as possible, Perl 5 is a powerful, capable language especially if you take advantage of the CPAN.

Hopefully my camel book will be sufficient to learn both from a basic level.

The most recent Camel is ten years old. Rakudo Star comes with a book on Perl 6. You can also read my Modern Perl draft book for an introduction to the current versions of Perl 5.

Re:New perl user

[jjn1056]

The ships are BIG, neither are sinking anytime soon.

If you want a job now, you probably should spend time on Perl5, since the bulk of work is there today. But if you want to join a dynamic community which is building a cool new language from scratch, and where you individual efforts can have a huge impact, you might want to check out Perl 6. That's my thoughts at least.

Re:github is a trap

[grumbel]

The important part with hosting services is that they have a good working data export, not that they run Open Source. In fact many Open Source based hosting solution have a rather incomplete data export, giving you lock-in even so it is all Open Source. No idea what Github allows you to export, but at least the core git repositories are trivial to move to a different host.

Re:github is a trap

[betterunixthanunix]

most code is written with the intent of releasing

Not true.

Re:github is a trap

[Brent Taylor]

Care to elaborate?

Re:github is a trap

[Thinboy00]

All forms of server side scripting, SaaS, just about everything written in SQL, most shell scripts, little glue programs (i.e. things you might write in Perl), etc.

Re:github is a trap

[oldhack]

Sure. GP is right, and you're wrong.

Re:github is a trap

[osu-neko]

Care to elaborate?

One would think the meaning is obvious, but I'll spell it out: the vast, vast majority of code is developed to be used in-house. A tiny, miniscule fraction of code "is written with the intent of releasing an application to the general population."

perl is community

[bill_mcgonigle]

Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6? Would anyone write new scripts in perl 6 as opposed to Python or Ruby or Perl 5? Really, would anyone except the most diehard Perl addicts even notice or care about Perl 6?

Yeah, I can't wait. I like programming in perl and ruby but not python. It doesn't mesh with me. But perl5's object system is a pain in the ass. perl6 takes what I love about java and ruby and expresses it like perl. :my hero:

perl is fast as hell and light on memory. Python tends to eat memory an ruby tends to be slow.

But most important to me is the perl community. Not just the perlmonks nerds, the guys who do release planning, application design, Q/A, test metrics, run CPAN, module maintainers. They do lots of things right.

Ruby is nearly there with GEM's, but darned if getting Rails working isn't an exacting science of matching old GEM versions. Security patch in the latest one? TFB.

Python has some great libraries and frameworks, but CPAN is much more comprehensive.

Which leads to the best part of perl6 - its parrot vm. The perl6 VM has implementations for python and ruby. I'm sure they're not complete or fully optimized yet, but the potential exists. Ruby stuff can run fast, python stuff can run light. And most importantly, we can all share a library - write the module in your language of choice and everybody who's using a parrot language can use it.

perl6 is still the future of high-level open source languages. Whether you like perl or not you should like perl6 because it's what open source is all about.

Re:perl is community

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I use Perl extensively and I agree with most of your post. However I have a love/hate relationship with CPAN. I prefer Ruby's GEM. Sure CPAN is very comprehensive, but actually using CPAN to install the modules can put you in a whole world of hurt. Why is there no easy way to uninstall the modules? I know people who would rather have an older version of a module and use RPM than to put up with the nonsense that is CPAN.

BTW, I must be blessed because I haven't had any versioning issues with GEM... yet.

Luckily for me my CPAN-fu is strong, and I can pretty much tame the temperamental beast. However, I keep wondering why I need to? It's like the only requirement for CPAN was to have a central repository that makes it easier to install library modules, and the modules are so fantastic we won't ever need to uninstall them. Sure you can manually remove a module from the lib directories, just cross your fingers about breaking some dependencies.

I know I'll probably ruffle some feathers, but I think of Ruby as Perl's little sister with better OO.

And what does that have to do with Github?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Generally, the reason I'd post something to somewhere like Github is precisely because I want the public to see it. If you want a private version, it's trivial to create a private branch and never push it to Github, or even push it to somewhere else.

This isn't like Facebook. Leave Github, and you may lose some of the additional tools (like issue tracking, wikis, etc), but you don't lose the code at all -- if you have even a single checkout of your code, you have the entire version history.

Oh, and Github doesn't insist on the GPL, as far as I know.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps not everyone is willing to deal with the other features of Haskell, such as monads. Perhaps they want these features in a language that resembles something they're already familiar with.

it's not hipness

[yyxx]

Well, I can't speak for others, but I have used Perl for nearly twenty years. Perl's syntax and type system still suck, even in Perl 6. But unlike other badly designed languages (C and C++), there are fortunately excellent real-world alternatives available to Perl. I see little risk of Perl ever coming back, thank God.

Re:it's not hipness

[chromatic]

Perl's syntax and type system still suck, even in Perl 6.

Have you tried Perl 6's type system? The combination of types, signatures, and multiple dispatch have ruined most other languages for me. (Pattern matching is a fine alternative in language which support that.)

Re:it's not hipness

[acid06]

Would you mind saying why you think it sucks? And what other languages do it better?

Re:it's not hipness

[yyxx]

Would you mind saying why you think it sucks?

Because this still works:

my $i = "25" + 10; # $i is 35

And what other languages do it better?

Just about any other language.

Re:it's not hipness

[trwww]

> Because this still works:

Sure. This is DWIW (Do What I Want). Why should the code to add a string and a number include a type conversion? You've used the + operator, so its obvious to everyone that you want to add. Why should the code have to be more verbose than that?

By your logic, this is better programming:

i = parseInt("25") + 10; # $i is 35

Thats better?

Re:it's not hipness

[acid06]

Well, this is a feature which I appreciate. Keep in mind that if you do:

    my $i = "aaa" + 10;

It will complain (if you're coding using the best practices). So I can't see what's the issue.

Re:it's not hipness

[Anonymous Coward]

Haskell and Scala both have a much more powerful type system.

Re:it's not hipness

[yyxx]

Sure. This is DWIW (Do What I Want). Why should the code to add a string and a number include a type conversion?

In order to capture programming errors.

You've used the + operator, so its obvious to everyone that you want to add. Why should the code have to be more verbose than that?

Because (1) adding a string to an integer is often indicative of an error elsewhere, (2) there is no single correct way of adding a string to an integer; it's ambiguous. Is the string an integer? A floating point number? Is it hex, binary, or octal?

Re:it's not hipness

[yyxx]

Well, I do code using best practices, by using languages in which this kind of error is caught by default. Not only does that mean that I don't have to think about it, I also don't have to worry about whether other people's code uses "best practices".

One can legitimately debate the merits of dynamic vs static typing. But weak (Perl, Tcl, Shell) vs strong (everybody else) typing is pretty much a settled issue.

Re:it's not hipness

[gbutler69]

it's ambiguous.

No it isn't.

Is the string an integer? A floating point number? Is it hex, binary, or octal?

Perl will figure out which it is automatically and correctly every time

Re:it's not hipness

[yyxx]

Perl will figure out which it is automatically and correctly every time

You just go on believing that. Fortunately, most programmers these days know better.

Re:it's not hipness

[chromatic]

If you have a test case which demonstrates that Perl 5 does the wrong thing, please submit it to p5p so that we can correct it. (See also the 23-year old file full of test cases which demonstrate that Perl does the right thing.)

Re:it's not hipness

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to debate this with you; if you haven't understood for the past 23 years what's wrong with Perl's type system, you aren't going to understand it in the next 23 years either.

I voted with my feet, as have many other Perl programmers. And if you think that Perl 6 is going to result in a big come-back for the Perl language, you're an even bigger fool.

Re:it's not hipness

[gbutler69]

I can't wait to start toying with Perl 6. So, they'll be seeing me come back. Fortunately, you are not the world.

Re:it's not hipness

[Anonymous Coward]

PS C:\> "25" + 10
2510
PS C:\> [int] "25" + 10
35
PS C:\># MS PowerShell v2. Yep. I suppose Perl does lose there, although one can't even declare variables in PS.

you obvously don't work in an established company

[doug]

Most of my career has been in telecom/datacom companies, and perl is the preferred language for testing and infrastructure. The last stint I did at a true startup ended in 2003 (I got the hell out) and they used tcl for testing. Since then I've only seen perl. Perl certainly is less popular in CGI and LAMP than it used to be, but that is the only major pull back I've noticed. But it isn't new and sexy, which is fine by me, and that is what many people seem to notice.

That said, I'm not sure if/when I'll adopt perl6. I like much of what I've seen, but I've got an install base to worry about. I either need a killer reason to switch, or a lot of dead time in my schedule. I jumped on perl4 -> perl5 back in the winter of 94/95, but that was such a huge step forward that it could not be ignored.

- doug

Fortune of Perl

[JimboFBX]

As a fairly skilled computer scientist I absolutely hate Perl. I recently inherited a perl project that was fairly large and fairly complex and had to really dig into the more complex parts of perl with it. The biggest problem with perl is it's readability and the fact its a "do what I mean" language that rarely does what you mean. If you've rarely dealt with shell scripting, the logic behind the syntax for it is nearly non-existent. It has a massive learning curve, which is probably why they sell so many damned Perl books. The worst part about perl is that its difficult to look up how things work online. Perl's insistence on using special characters instead of words makes things difficult to read, understand, and look-up, and the number of special exceptions to things make things damned impossible at times when something is syntactically correct and yet still doesn't work right. I've found an amazing number of websites give simple incomplete examples for Perl. For example one popular reference website lacks a lot of useful and common parts of perl, like something as basic as getline.

Trying to remember what specifically was wrong with Perl; issues that eat up hours of time the first time you encounter them or when they aren't freshly in your memory:
having a $1 instead of a $l.
Arrays of arrays. Hashes of hashes. References to hashes of arrays... etc. Then pass them into a subroutine that is part of a class.
Using the debugger.
Trying to understand someone else's regular expression
a mysterious $_ in someone else's uncommented code
A class's function's reference. WTF does "can't create sub Main:: " mean? If I can call the function why can't I reference it?
Trying to use parenthesis to change precedence only to accidentally create an array instead.
Not knowing that parenthesis can create an array
Trying to create a naked hash
Thinking my $a, $b, $c = @something; is the same as my ($a,$b,$c) = @something;
Coming across the heap corruption bug in IO::uncompress in earlier versions
Not knowing how to typecast using squiggly brackets
Not realizing the requirement that arrays and hashes be typecasted after being dereferenced from a reference
Trying to read from standard input
Trying to write to a file
Not understanding the difference between print and printf
Not being able to slice a substring from a string
Not being able to index a character in a string
Trying to use a class like you would in C++
Trying to use a $ when it should be a @ or vice versa.
Trying to see if a file exists
Trying to use @somearray to get the number of elements, as directed by a website, only to get the array instead. (i.e. not knowing about the scalar keyword) Trying to read a line of Perl out loud
And more...

And Perl 6 doesn't improve anything at all. Be ready to do some legitimate stuff that won't do what you thought it would do... all over again!

Some of my favorites:
Was: $#array+1 or scalar(@array)
Now: @array.elems

The easy to read __FILE__ is now $?FILE

Was: $str =~ m/^\d{2,5}\s/i
Now: $str ~~ m:P5:i/^\d{2,5}\s/

Was: if (-r $file && -x _) {...}
Now: if $file ~~ :r & :x {...}

Yes sirree, they really helped improved the shortfalls of Perl. It really was not $$bugprone.enough(@{($confusing, $hardto$read)}).

Re:Fortune of Perl

[jjn1056]

I'm sorry you inherited a complex, and idiomatic perl application. However I don't think its fair, computer scientist or not, to project that experience onto the entire modern Perl ecosystem. Good luck with your career.

Re:Fortune of Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you've demonstrated your ability to jump into a new language without learning anything about it, and make a bunch of assumptions. Bravo!

If you had bothered to read any of the documentation that shipped with it, you would find most of those non-issues, or easily explained with very little work. And seriously, if you can't find info on what the difference between print and printf is, you've got much more serious problems than Perl being the language you're trying to work in. That's explained EVERYWHERE, and it's the exact same as the C function (since it's only a thin veneer on it anyway).

Re:Fortune of Perl

[slblink]

The worst part about perl is that its difficult to look up how things work online.

Ehr.. there is something called perldoc and it ships with each perl installation.

having a $1 instead of a $l.

$ perldoc perlre

Arrays of arrays. Hashes of hashes. References to hashes of arrays... etc. Then pass them into a subroutine that is part of a class.

$ perldoc perlintro

Trying to understand someone else's regular expression

WTF? How is it perls problem that you did not spend some time to learn about regexpes? They are not a perl-only feature. As a scientist you should be able to understand/learn new things.

a mysterious $_ in someone else's uncommented code

$perldoc perlintro (again...) well: I'm stopping at this point because all of your 'problems' would be solved by *reading* and *understanding* 'perldoc perlintro' but wait:

Not understanding the difference between print and printf

You are joking?! Didn't you claim that you are a 'fairly skilled computer scientist' ? .. oops.

Re:Fortune of Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

having a $1 instead of a $l.

Sounds more like bad fonts than a problem with the language, how about ( vs [ vs { in C/Java?

Arrays of arrays. Hashes of hashes. References to hashes of arrays... etc. Then pass them into a subroutine that is part of a class.

Array of arrays? Same as javascript, [ [ 1,2 ], [3,4] ], described in the "list of lists" perldoc page "perllol"
Hash of hashes? { x => { y => 1, z => 2 } }, similar to Javascript/PHP but without 'array =>' cruft and using => (or ,) instead of :, seems straightfoward enough - perldoc perldsc (Data Structures) for more info.

Using the debugger.

perl -d script.pl, then h for more info - personally I find gdb far more cryptic,

Trying to understand someone else's regular expression

Applies to any language with regex support, whether builtin or via libraries.

a mysterious $_ in someone else's uncommented code

It's used as the general-purpose iterator in most constructions, sounds like bad code if it had no comments and was long enough to be confusing.

A class's function's reference. WTF does "can't create sub Main:: " mean? If I can call the function why can't I reference it?

What do you want to reference? A method in a class? Then don't reference it, just use $instance->$method() notation, where $method is the method (just a string).

Trying to use parenthesis to change precedence only to accidentally create an array instead.

Unless you had multiple expressions ($x = 3, $y = 4) then () doesn't "accidentally" create arrays.

Not knowing that parenthesis can create an array

It doesn't, perhaps you're confused over scalar vs. list context?

Trying to create a naked hash

my %hash = (x => 1);

Thinking my $a, $b, $c = @something; is the same as my ($a,$b,$c) = @something;

List vs. scalar context again.

Coming across the heap corruption bug in IO::uncompress in earlier versions

Not been hit by this personally but bugs in core modules are never fun.

Not knowing how to typecast using squiggly brackets

"Typecast"? Do you mean dereference, as in @$var or @{$var->{something}} ? Described in perlref and perlreftut pages.

Not realizing the requirement that arrays and hashes be typecasted after being dereferenced from a reference

The sigil ($, @, %, &) indicates the type of the expression, so $arrayref is a scalar, if you wanted the array (dereference) then you put @ in front, the rules are consistent and described in perldoc perlref.

Trying to read from standard input

<STDIN>, described in perlop

Trying to write to a file

open, print, close? Seems as simple as any other language.

Not understanding the difference between print and printf

I'd question any CS professional's credentials if they weren't familiar with printf already.

Not being able to slice a substring from a string

perldoc -f substr, same as many other languages except you can also use it as an lvalue, which allows things like substr($str, 3, 5) = ''.

Not being able to index a character in a string

uh, perldoc -f index perhaps?

Trying to use a class like you would in C++

It's not C++. Why would you treat it like C++? The object system is different, in some ways more flexible since you can dynamically add methods at any time.

Trying to use a $ when it should be a @ or vice versa.

Re:Fortune of Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to remember what specifically was wrong with Perl

How does a list of statements that are almost all the equivalent of saying "Not understanding..." and "Not knowing..." indicate anything other than what was wrong with the programmer trying to use perl? Some things in perl are intuitive and some things are very unintuitive - which could be said of just about every programming language that I've ever personally worked with. Perl could be made *a lot* more readable if the language encouraged it, but despite that it is not so, it can be made quite readable if the perl programmer decides to make it so.

It really really stinks having to take over an old, decrepit, poorly designed and written, undocumented, un-commented codebase no matter what language it was written in; worse when you *don't know the language*. But then blaming the language is like walking into an ancient shanty town shack and deciding that wood is a terrible building material.

a decade too soon

[epine]

Perl 6 is a stillborn fetus, left lying on the ground for a decade, getting all smelly and rotten.

That's an appropriate sentiment for a guy who choses his programming language the same way he chooses his girlfriend.

The true test of Perl 6 is how many of the new genes baked into Perl 6 show up in Python/PHP/Ruby ten years from now. That would make Perl 6 an important language, even if it never gets laid.

At some point I'm going to give Perl 6 a shot with an open mind, and see whether all those years paid off with a mature reflection on the nature of womanhood. Even if it's not girlfriend material.

Re:a decade too soon

[Vectormatic]

explaining a concept using a woman/girlfriend analogy? you must be new here..

Re:a decade too soon

[CatsupBoy]

That's an appropriate sentiment for a guy who choses his programming language the same way he chooses his girlfriend.

Are you saying Java is the only one that would let him program in it?

Some Companies using Perl to build Big Site

[jjn1056]

http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.

So you are wrong in your guess that "80%" of Perl programmers are sysadmins writing cron jobs. Whoever modded you up should have done a bit of checking, because marking your opinion as insightful is highly inaccurate.

There have been several new Perl books written just for Catalyst in the past two years, so just because you are not finding anything new for Mason (which is probably not the framework of choice for the modern Perl programmer anyway) that is not much of an indicator. There's tons of FREE docs and examples for Perl in any case (http://search.cpan.org/)

As far as Google's lack of commitment to Perl, well, I'm sorry to hear about that, but that's one company. Google Appengine is a pretty small garden, and the Perl interpreter has trouble running under its confinement. To be honest, Python doesn't run everything under appengine either, you need to write code for appengine. I think getting PHP or other languages to run under it will be equally difficult.

If you want to program in Perl on the cloud you have a ton of options, such as EC2, Rackspace cloud and pretty much any cloud provider with an open system (not Appengines walled garden) Oh, and if you want a smarter search engine, trying http://duckduckgo.com/, which is written in Perl and I find more useful than Google search.

I realize that the Perl community needs to do a better job showing that we are not stuck in 1998, so I forgive your lack of knowledge in this matter. I do actually appreciate the opportunity to discuss it, since this is really the only way this perception problem with be solved. However I hope you can meet me halfway and do a bit of checking on modern Perl before you make such sweeping judgments again. Because to be honest this exact opinion you've expressed I've seen over and over again for several years, and it's totally different from what I see everyday, as a fulltime, highly paid Perl programmer for at least 15 years. Take a look at Moose (http://moose.perl.org/) if you think Perl's OO is lagging, or Plack (http://plackperl.org/) if you think Mason and mod_perl is all we have, for example. Our community is smart, diverse, highly active and strongly focused on the next 20 years of Perl.

John Napiorkowski

Re:Some Companies using Perl to build Big Site

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst

That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.

Actually you're wrong on the iPlayer comment. Yes, current iPlayer runs on Perl but the new one which will replace it does not. It is actually PHP web app instead (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/05/introducing_the_all_new_bbc_ip.html), with Java thrown in for some services. So wonder what that says for Perl that a high volume site is moving away from Perl to PHP.
As far as I'm aware Perl is still used in parts of the new iPlayer site but it doesn't have the same major role as it did before.

Re:Some Companies using Perl to build Big Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Our community is smart, diverse, highly active and strongly focused on the next 20 years of Perl.

Please, find another Logo then !

oh come on

[Phantom of the Opera]

We all know that Duke Nukem is gonna be written in Perl 6 and run on HURD.

Ruby and Python users masquerading as neutral

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes me laugh to read comments from Ruby and Python users masquerading as neutral commentators on a Perl6 release, damning it with faint praise in a futile attempt to kill it.

In a year or so Perl6 will be the cool scripting language to brag about and Ruby and Python will look staid and old hat by comparison. All your attacks will simply feed interest.

Learn it now or be left behind suckers.

Re:you obvously don't work in an established compa

[jgrahn]

Most of my career has been in telecom/datacom companies, and perl is the preferred language for testing and infrastructure.

Me too, but Python (and a proprietary language which shall be unnamed) are preferred here. There's some Perl in vital places, but it's mostly written by old farts like me.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[dolmen.fr]

Just about every "benefit" of Perl 6 is something that Haskell alone has offered in a usable form for years, if not decades.

As you seem to be in the Haskell community, you are probably aware that GHC development has been pushed by Audrey Tang's work on its own Perl 6 implementation (Pugs) by experimenting advanced features of GHC. So the Haskell community has already benefited from Perl 6.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really know, as I am pretty much a Lua guy, but, isn't Perl somewhat obsolete in favor of Python? I have even seen Perl apps ported to Python recently (such as Zim). Am I too shortsighted or Perl is losing userbase?

Thanks Larry

[mallyone]

My unborn grandson's grandson will look forward to a pre-alpha version of perl6.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Tang's work had little to no impact on GHC, or the wider Haskell community. He/she was a brief blip around 2005. Haskell has a long history stretching back into the 1980s, with GHC going back years, as well. It takes far more than a failed Perl 6 interpreter to affect Haskell in any appreciable way.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[dargaud]

Can you modify the grammar of the language in place?

Why would you want to do something as monstrous as this ? To ensure that you are the only coder who will ever be able to understand the code ? I thought using Perl was already enough for that purpose... If you can use rules to turn a language into another that is entirely your own, I'm sure I won't want to use it. Yeah, I like Ada but not Perl, clarity for me is a lot more important than conciseness and 'absolute power'.

Far advanced

[mattr]

I haven't tried Rakudo Perl yet but my impression is that Perl 6 and Parrot will enable many things to be possible.
For example with parrot (correct me if I'm wrong) you would be able to mix different libraries written in different languages together easily. And Perl 6 is intended to be more advanced and flexible than other languages for the next 20 or 30 years. So in that sense it is far premature to be writing anti-Perl things when the first public release for a wider audience to try Rakugo Perl has been announced.

It should be celebrated not dissed. Finally, in terms of lines of code and how freely creative one may be, and how fun it is to use, Perl beats Java and Perl 6 may turn out to be awesome, who knows? The stupidest post of all was by a self-described "pretty sharp computer scientist" who never read a single manual on the language and dove in to a big program without understanding it. I mean the guy didn't even know that $_ is the default input, i.e. the next line read from a file. I think this really tells on the current totally ungeeky, uncool, unintelligent, inexperienced status of the average Slashdot reader.

I've met some of the people building Perl 6. They are cool, intelligent, funny, altruistic, geeky, and having tons of fun at what they are doing. They've spent a long time on it and they've plundered the state of the art in language design to do it. They aren't insular or hating other languages, they love cool stuff like Haskell and Ruby. My impression is the language is totally customizable if you are smart enough too. If I had more free time I would be investigating all kinds of stuff like Erlang and Scala, dive deep into Perl 6, any language is going to stretch your mind.

Oh, sorry, is Python the last thing you will ever need to know? Hah. I bet Perl 6 and Parrot will be great and I hate to hear people say detrimental things about something like that which has plenty of promise. $Foo on you! The rest of us are applauding them for their magnificent achievement and ongoing dedication. Plainly enough, they are heroes and deserve medals of honor and knighthoods.

Camelia the butterfly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Going to the perl6 website I was greeted by a butterfly named Camelia...
Further investigation into the website brought up this awkward little snippit:

"Certain variants are also permissible; since Camelia knows how to
change her wing colors at will, any color scheme (or lack thereof)
in the same pattern is fine. She just happens to like bright colors
most of the time because they make her happy. But she's willing to
blend in where necessary. :)"

*steps away slowly*

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[sco08y]

You really need to brush up on what other languages are offering if you think those "features" are "amazing".

Nice troll, I'll bite. FWIW, I've been learning Haskell over the last few months, and I really like the language, but let's face it: Perl6 is a language that 90% of people (who can program at all) can use, whereas maybe 10% of people can use Haskell. After listening to their users, the Python community decided to deprecate the reduce operator. Haskell, on the other hand, has about a dozen fold operators throughout its standard library, and that's a standard way to express most algorithms.

So, yes, these features, in a usable form, are pretty amazing. I'll have to see if Perl6 beats Python3 or Ruby, but it's just not a competing in the same arena as Haskell.

Perl 6's "roles" are merely interfaces, which even Java has had since the very beginning. They're significantly less powerful than Haskell's typeclasses.

Roles / interfaces are entirely different from typeclasses. Haskell's Hadley-Milner based type system, while very powerful, doesn't allow for inheritance.

"Grammars" is very similar to the pattern matching you see in languages like Haskell, SML and even Scala.

Not even remotely. Pattern matching is a basic technique in functional languages, whereas Perl6 is an OO imperative language. Grammars in Perl6 are used to build new sublanguages, which most other languages don't even attempt.

Perl 6's "constraints" are significantly less powerful and less flexible than the pattern guards of Haskell.

Possibly, though again Haskell's guards are based on its type system which is less flexible than Perl's.

"Multidispatch" has been offered by Common Lisp's CLOS system for many, many years now. Haskell's polymorphism is far more flexible than Perl 6's multidispatch support.

But, again, no inheritance, no OOP in Haskell. And while it is flexible, it has its limitations, as anyone who has run into the monomorphism restriction can attest.

"Autothreading hyperoperator"-like functionality has been offered by the GHC Haskell compiler for a long time now. Hell, we could even do the same years ago with collection classes written in C++, where we'd override certain operators to spawn threads and process different parts of the collection simultaneously.

But that's not in Haskell98.

Just about every "benefit" of Perl 6 is something that Haskell alone has offered in a usable form for years, if not decades.

Try doing a GUI in Haskell.

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[sco08y]

Why would you want to do something as monstrous as this ?

Many problems can be simplified greatly by recasting them in a language that expresses them naturally.

And that's why, more often than not, large projects involve writing a sublanguage of some sort. And if the mechanism used to write the sublanguage is standardized, it makes it that much easier for someone else to come along and understand what's going on.

Keep in mind that most of OOP is actually writing a sublanguage. That's what a class hierarchy really is; it's just that the syntax is usually horrible and clunky. With grammars you just get the ability to express it naturally.

Developing versus Hacking

[AutumnLeaf]

By "hacking" I mean "slamming out some quick-and-dirty program." I can see the 500 replies to this decrying my misuse of the word Hacking comnig. In anticipation of that, consider that the word can be used in many ways to convey nuances of meaning, and I think this works. Moving on...

Everyone I know still doing Perl (including me sometimes) is working in the systems space. Service management, system monitoring and management... Perl is just a better shell scripting language in this context.

I don't know anyone doing application development in perl anymore. My friends and peers who used to walk on water with their god-like perl skills have all moved on to Python and Ruby, and I'm heading that way myself now. One friend remarked to me "I wish I'd switched from Python to Perl sooner. Ten years of Perl man ... that shit rots your brain." One person who is still heavily involved with the perl development community informed me within the past year "What people don't realize about Perl 6 was that it was a research project."

Um.... well, that's clearly what Perl 6 became. But I remember when Perl 6 was announced - it was not framed as "I'm going to do a research project while other people take care of the production perl." That's what effectively happened, but that's not really what was planned based on my recollection of OSCON talks and previous slashdot articles.

Anyway... while Perl can do almost anything, I think other languages do a lot of those things more cleanly, and in a manner more conducive to writing code that doesn't suck to maintain. That said, I look forward to Perl 6 finally being "mostly done" so it can truly be assessed on its own merits, not its lamentable history.

And why do people like to hate on Perl 6? In my opinion its simple - missed commitments on schedule. Lots of them.

Who needs Perl 6 when all languages do regexps?

[cognominally]

Interesting that someone is talking about regular expressions and mentionning

> the absence of comparably useful alternatives, something that's no longer the case.

Other languages have indeed borrowed and extended the regular expression engine without questioning the initial design that is contemporary of the first Unix, with commands like sed. At some point, one has to sit down and redesign a feature set to clean it up and integrate it to the whole. That's the very point of Perl 6 and the grammar syntax is only a part. It may be debatable that the Perl 6 design is great or not. But the regular expression engine is now a full grammar engine. It is used to bootstrap the Perl language so it is the part that has been the most exercised.I don't ever hear someone that has used it saying that the design is unsound.

"But Perl has often been tagged as a language in which it's easy to write programs that are difficult to read, and it's no secret that regular expression syntax that has been the chief culprit. Funny that other languages have been borrowing Perl's regular expressions as fast as they can..." says Larry Wall in http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A05.html

The problem with all general purpose languages except Perl 6 is that regular expression is a side language or a library. The perl 5 interpreter has to resort to hand-lexing and yacc to parse Perl programs. And you had to use libraries if you wanted to do serious parsing, like Parse::Yapp, Parse::RecDescent or more recently Regex::Grammars.

Now, contrary to Perl 5, the parser engine is correctly integrated in the language and is used to parse Perl 6 programs which is a good clue to think it can handle very complex grammars.

Perl 6 is doing just what Perl had done in its time. Concentrating in a coherent whole what was scattered in many places. The price to pay is abandoning retrocompatibility and changing your habits for better ones.
I agree that the engine is slow, but that is an (early) implementation problem, not a design one.

Re:github is a trap

[Candyban]

the vast, vast majority of code is developed to be used in-house. A tiny, miniscule fraction of code "is written with the intent of releasing an application to the general population."

Where do you get your numbers from?

Let us assume we are only talking about useful code. So not including learning/pet projects or other non- Most people and organizations use a multitude of general purpose software and only a fraction of custom code. The amount of code used to write the OS and tools with which the "custom code" is usually a multitude of code which is actually produced. Then also take into account the code to run said custom code (frameworks, libraries, ...) and I would say the balance is not so clear cut. Now also take into account all the code that goes into appliances from digital thermometer to MRI machine.

The bulk of the industry is using general purpose software with only a fraction of custom code. You would be amazed at how little actual code goes into factory automation and even those programs are usually written by the manufacturers which then would not qualify as code for "in-house" use. Custom code is mainly used by IT shops, financial institutions and governments and a lot of these tasks are outsourced and performed by consultants or software houses rather than actual "in-house" developers.

Is your conclusion based on actual information or more personal experience?

Re:"Amazing" features offered by Haskell years ago

[chromatic]

Why would you want to do something as monstrous as this ?

I recently moved my office, so I don't have my copy of The Practice of Programming handy. If you do, see chapter 9.

Perl 6 is doomed

[dskoll]

Perl 6 is doomed. I develop in Perl 5 every day and love it. I also like the Perl community. But Perl 6 is the classic example of a software project heading for failure:

• 10 years in the making and only a bloated and slow alpha to show for it.
• Pursuit of one line of development (Pugs) only to abandon it and pursue a totally different line (Parrot)
• Lots of experimental features with very little real-world experience as to how they will turn out.
• A massive re-engineering to "fix" all the perceived flaws in Perl 5

What we have is a classic Second System.

I have some very basic and simplistic measurements of Rakudo Star vs. Perl 5 on my blog and the numbers are downright depressing.

Re:Perl 6 is doomed

[chromatic]

What a shame you kept all of the inaccuracies in your comparisons, even after you responded to the corrections.

Blank? Blank!? Let me worry about Blank!

[SirSpammenot]

But seriously... We just wrote an enterprise, line of business application in Perl using Catalyst, Moose, DBIx, Template Toolkit, etc. After that experience this 44 year old programmer says "You can pry Perl from my cold dead fingers". In just over a year, my small team of two accomplished what takes competitors 2+ years with actual staff of 5+. Additionally I am not even sure we could have met the performance requirements with .Net or Java. Writing large apps in Modern Perl has been frigging wonderful, people. I like going to work again. That is why Perl isn't "dead". I am looking forward to Perl6, because I am all about leaving on time. Every day. Which Perl enabled me to do now. Congrats Rakudo Star team!

Perl 6 dying?!?! It just a baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe how much people are calling the language "dead"... I mean, the first usable version just came out, and you are saying that is dead?

If it took 10 years, so what?... I think the huge ammount of features (all very useful by the way) justifies it. I don't think they took 10 years in just one version. They probably started from scratch again and again in many aspects... but that's much better than keep on going with a not-so-flexible architecture.

All in all, i certainly expect that the critics here spends half an hour reading the introductory with this rakudo release. I did it, with a console, a text editor and the PDF book opened, and man, perl6 is cool... Slow.... but cool. We just can expect speed to improve...

Now a rant:

I just wish they didn't use the name perl6 for that.... that kinda stops perl5 evolution, (from a shallow, "commercial", perception). Rakudo is a cool name for a language, even Perl++

And Camelia should die!