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

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: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: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: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.