Slashdot Mirror
Perl 6 Released (wordpress.com)
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."
First post,
I love Perl
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
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?
It's April Fools already! The older I get, the faster time flies by, I swear...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
"This Rakudo release targets those tests (over 120 thousand of them), and passes them all on at least some architectures when the moon is in the right phase."
In all seriousness, I suppose I'll take a look at it. I'm guessing, however, that Perl 6 is not going to be widely used or liked; it's simply been too long, and Perl isn't even used that much anymore either. That may not impact the dev team directly, but it does mean they're not going to get the support they did with Perl 4 and 5, although I am curious in what they improved during these 15 years.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Well OK that is a bit much... but looking forward to explore Perl 6 in the New Year.
How much you wanna be that because PHP just had their first major version increase in over a decade just this very month is the only real reason that Perl decided to do the same? Now I'm personally not trying to advocate or attach either language here, just pointing out the interesting comparison and timing.
One thing that caught my eye was this:
Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value
and
Provide tau constant (also: )
(There's a Unicode tau there that slashdot won't pass)
I've seen this in Emacs LISP, but I haven't seen it elsewhere (granted, I mostly use older languages...). I imagine non-ASCII characters in code are going to be a point of contention among developers.
Related:
Superscripts can now be used for integer powers
I haven't payed much attention to Perl 6 (I use Perl 5 for a lot, though), but now I'm looking forward to playing with this.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Yo yo hipster web developers. The new rockstar language is Erlang reborn aka Outlaw Techno Psycobitch which you can write hipster low 16 color flat modern impress your cat applications and websites!!
Perl and Ruby on rails is sooo last decade man for crusty developers
http://saveie6.com/
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!
I'm not sure I like all that simplification. I mean, I kinda liked it when @array[ 1 ] and $array[ 1 ] had different results (but worked on the same array).
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Well, let me be the first to say - that's really cool! No matter what your favorite language is, congratulations to the Perl 6 team are in order for their hard work and perserverance.
Why "Now" after a comma?
At the bottom of the
repost
Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.
Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.
Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin' ... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.
Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.
~~ with apology and deference to Dave Barry
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Until it gets here
https://www.perl.org/
I ain't bothering.
For all those talking about a release of a compiler (but not yet including all modules and other support stuff), rather than the release of the language spec, this is a pretty half-baked "release". It sounds more like yet another dreary development pre-release such as we've been showered with for many years.
From the Rakudo announcement:
It passes the full set of language tests on selected architectures when the (quote) "moon is in the right phase".
"There is still plenty of work ahead for us to improve speed, portability, and stability."
"We do not claim an absence of bugs or instabilities."
"We do not claim the documentation is complete."
"We do not claim portability to many architectures."
"We do not claim that all downstream software will work correctly."
Basically all they DO "claim" is that the language spec is finally, FINALLY stable, and there is a first developmental stab at implementing all of it.
Oh, and the release tag is a bunch of incomprehensible, impossible to remember or pronounce, Cyrillic characters impossible to post here or in any ASCII message. It's just symptomatic of the whole weird alien process associated with Perl 6 from the beginning. I have a lot of respect for a lot of the new stuff in Perl 6, but as a project it is just not very serious.
I wonder if Larry Wall even still uses PERL...
Perl 6 has not been released "after 15 years of work". It has been marred by one disaster after another. It has been released after 15 years of failure.
Those who have been following its development then entire time will remember the Parrot virtual machine shenanigans, which wasted many years, and prevented a usable Perl 6 implementation from becoming available.
Then there was the Pugs implementation of it, which actually seemed slightly promising at first. That, of course, turned into a disaster when the lead programmer decided to change his gender. (I'm not even joking!)
There's also Perl 6's absurd logo, which renders Perl 6 unusable in any serious environment. We'd be laughed at if we showed the Perl 6 home page to managers, executives or clients when advocating for the use of Perl 6. They'd think we were pulling their leg by using a language with such a childish logo.
Lately the focus has been on Rakudo which has taken years to produce something even minimally useful. I've read reports that it's slow and forces you to use some obscure MoarVM they've created (this sounds to me like they're on the road to another Parrot-style failure!) or the JVM.
Perl 6 has been a shameful episode in the history of programming languages. It's even worse that it has permanently tainted the Perl name.
Over the years of using Perl5 I have realized its greatest shortcoming: I have to type $/%/@ characters too often, what sometimes gets me - especially if I try to do something OO in Perl.
I have looked (again) at Perl6 recently, and was appalled to see that it used even more of punctuation than the Perl5.
As a way forward for Perl5, a special mode which allows to omit the $/%/@ qualifiers would be really nice. After all, Perl already has the "bareword" error handling: it shouldn't be too hard to make the qualifier optional.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Not a Perl veteran, but as some one who have used Perl as one of the main programming languages from last 9 years and has written Production applications in Perl covering more than 50,000 LOC, I am pleasantly surprised to see new Perl 6 Language specification. It is new Perl, with better & cleaner syntax without compromising original Perl identity of being expressive, the language of programmers (more than the language of computers) and many other good things Perl has to offer to generations of Programmers. Even with Perl 5, I never understood so called write only language stamping on Perl, as code written by me has been well maintained in last 9 years by 2 different successive teams to add new features. Ironically, pure Java programmers quickly understood one of my 8 years Perl application code while porting it to Java to gain better performance on multi-core processor in visualized environment (which had good mathematical computations). So its all about programming style, not programming language itself. Seeing new Perl 6, which looks considerably different from Perl 5 and adds many great things to help programmers to write faster and better programs, I think it will be liked by all Perl lovers and sys admins, as well as by new programmers coming in contact with Perl!!
It really seems like Perl 6 is a solution in search of a problem. Twenty years ago, Perl 5 was literally better than nothing - an intermediate step between shell scripts and C. Ten years ago, it was a scripting tool I could use on otherwise restrictive embedded environments. Today, I only use it because I have this one legacy script I haven't yet bothered to rewrite. At no point have I been on a project and thought "Perl would be ideal for this". It's always been "Aw crap, guess I'll settle for Perl".
These days, if I can't do something with a Bash script or quick & dirty PHP, then I fire up an IDE and write C/C++/C#, for the simple reason that they can leverage great debugging tools that Perl cannot.
-Billco, Fnarg.com