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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."
Calling anything whatsoever that involves Perl 6 'early' is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks.
Ice Cream has no bones.
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.
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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.
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!)
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
A subtle but scathing point! I apologize and amend my comment: hundreds of millions of literate people could write useful programs.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
Advice: on VPS providers
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).
Nonsense.
They're significantly different from Haskell's typeclasses, Haskell being a language which tends to avoid the OO paradigm.
I've never used SML or Scala. Can you modify the grammar of the language in place?
Does Haskell offer parametric pattern guards?
Indeed it has, and no one familiar with languages would claim otherwise.
That process sounds much more manual than Perl 6 hyperoperators.
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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."
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."