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Perl 6 Released (wordpress.com)

Posted by timothy on from the theory-and-practice dept.

Earlier this month, we noted the Perl 6 advent calendar. Now, an anonymous reader writes to note that, right on schedule, and after 15 years of work, Perl 6 has been released. The top two bullet points in the linked description say that the newest Perl "retains the core values of Perl: expressiveness, getting the job done, taking influences from natural language, and pushing the boundaries of language design," and that is "has clean, modern syntax, rooted in familiar constructs but revisiting and revising the things that needed it." However, while it's nice to see Perl 6 reach official release, the team behind it takes pains to note that work goes on: "We will continue to ship monthly releases, which will continue to improve performance and our user’s experience." Further, "[T]his Rakudo release is not considered the primary deliverable for this Christmas; it is the language specification, known as “roast” (Repository Of All Spec Tests), that is considered the primary deliverable."

4 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. That old chestnut? LOL. by mfearby · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yawn. The world has moved on. I used Perl 15 years ago but Perl 6 has taken far too long. Why should I use it now over anything else?

    1. Re:That old chestnut? LOL. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

      The thing about C++ is that in all that time, no-one has come up with an acceptable replacement, so people stuck to what they had.

      Not so with Perl.

    2. Re:That old chestnut? LOL. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The thing about C++ is that in all that time, no-one has come up with an acceptable replacement, so people stuck to what they had.

      Not so with Perl.

      The thing about Lisp (which came out in 1958) is that in all that time, no-one has come up with an acceptable replacement. Greenspun's tenth rule of programming: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Well, perhaps Smalltalk.

  2. Some more information by bads · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Perl 6 Architect writes about the 7-8 years work put in to get this far at https://6guts.wordpress.com/20...

    "In the coming days, weâ(TM)ll also produce a Rakudo Star release â" which consists of the compiler along with documentation and a selection of modules â" and that will also have an MSI, to make life easier for Windows folks."

    There will also be perl 6 speedups in a series of monthly releases next year.

    A good starting point with download instructions and docs links is
    http://perl6.org/downloads/

    Have fun!