Perl 6 is fun

http://blog.urth.org/2015/11/29/perl-6-is-fun/

by kamaal • 11 years ago

194 145 11 years ago

blog.urth.org

xlm1717• 11 years ago

I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release a lot of people are starting to go back to it and having fun with it again. And like the author mentions, they improved on a lot of things with perl 6.

nickysielicki5• 11 years ago

Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl.

I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the majority of their career.

Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or haskell.

AndyNemmity• 11 years ago

We used to make our living writing perl, but many of us moved on to python after so many missteps in release of perl 6.

The question to me is, is there a reason to go back to perl? I don't know the answer.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence.

Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed.

Anyway, that is my little digression.

latenightcoding• 11 years ago

Fun don't pay the bills though

Not true at all. Thanks to perl I have been working high paying jobs from home since I was 19.

And I always get banks or other big companies contacting me because they need a UNIX/Perl programmer or a sysadmin

doktrin4• 11 years ago

Naive question time. Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be looking into?

This may be inflammatory, but it's my earnest impression : as an outsider, I really don't like how Perl's versioning was handled (5 vs. 6). On top of being unnecessarily confusing, it also gives an impression of complete mismanagement - fair or not.

With so many languages out there to choose from, what sets Perl 6 apart from other modern languages and ecosystems?

bcoates• 11 years ago

Don't know much about the rest of the language, but the Perl 6 regexes are a big improvement and I hope they take over as the conventional syntax in the world outside of Perl.

giaour2• 11 years ago

What appeals to you about the new regex system? Is it a new syntax or an expanded feature set?

nickysielicki5• 11 years ago

What exactly don't you like about the way they did the versioning?

Do you prefer what python did? Python 2 vs. Python 3 is a complete and utter mess. Perl, which exists mostly in the same use case, shouldn't have any of those problems.

cname• 11 years ago

Python 2 vs. Python 3 is a complete and utter mess.

Besides being off topic and adding no value to this thread, for those of us who made the transition to Python 3 with minimal fuss, this is just pure hyperbole. I really wish people would quit grinding their Python 2/3 axes.

jlarocco3• 11 years ago

As a former Perl user, and a current Python user (though less lately), I very much prefer the Python transition.

I might be an exception, but I've had very few issues with the Python2 to Python3 transition. Python3 made the language more consistent, made a lot of little things simpler and easier, and added several features that makes using it generally more straightforward than Python2. It's essentially the same language, with warts removed. Library support lagged a bit, so on the odd occasion I need an old library, I just use Python2. Both versions can coexist on the same system, so it's not a big deal.

More relevant, though, Python3 was announced and then released when they said it would be. Some parts of the library community dragged their feet with support, and in a lot of cases they were replaced with even better libraries. The important thing is that the language was out and people could use it, and everybody's on the same page that Python3 is the future of Python.

The Perl transition has been a total mess in comparison. Perl6 is not just removing the warts from Perl5, it's an entirely different language. It's been "right around the corner" for almost 15 years now, and as far as I can tell, still isn't released. And good luck porting 25k CPAN modules to a completely new language.

To put it another way, in 15 years Perl6 has gone from announced to still not existing, while in 8 years Python3 was announced, released, and has had vast parts of its library ecosystem have been ported. Seems hard to believe anybody would say the Perl6 transition has gone better.

s_kilk• 11 years ago

In my opinion, yes.

I had zero perl experience before diving into perl6. I've found it to be a great language with a fun community.

As for compelling features, there was a good discussion on this a few days ago, so I'm just going to link to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10637789

sdegutis• 11 years ago

In my mind, the great thing about Perl has always been that it's built into pretty much every UNIX-like system, so you can literally use it out of the box in either Mac OS X or any flavor of Linux. But Perl 6 isn't universal like that (yet?) so to me it just competes with Python and Ruby, both of which I already know and which get the job done just fine, and which I have installed wherever I need it.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

The subtype system is cool, the async too, the custom grammar also.

kbenson16• 11 years ago

I think it's less what Perl 6 has that other languages don't have (almost everything is implemented in at least one language), and more that it implements everything together in one language. The pure breadth of what is supported is somewhat staggering. I posted the other day[1] about what I thought were some interesting features, so that might be a good start for some things that might set it apart.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642153

esaym2• 11 years ago

There are plenty of Perl5 users that have never liked the idea of "Perl6" and swear that they will never use it. That is just one of the reasons why Perl6 took awhile to release. It was not made by the Perl5 community, it was/is a different community although it does have some Perl5 guys strewn through it. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I plan on picking it up soon. So yes, non-perl people should try it. Other than the name, and Larry Wall, there is not much the same between the two.

I am not following your issues with the versioning. Perl6 was supposed to be released like back in 2005 or so. In that context it made sense that the next release of Perl would be 6 and that the 5 series would just go into maintenance only mode. But that didn't really happen. Perl5 devs continued to do their own thing while a new community was built around Perl6 with different people.

doktrin4• 11 years ago

I am not following your issues with the versioning.

As I understand it, Perl 6 is essentially a complete language overhaul. However, the sequential numbering implies an iteration. To me, that's unintuitive.

At the risk of over-analogizing, it's a bit as if Scala had been released as Java (n). Totally, completely irrational? Maybe not. Confusing? Almost certainly.

ams6110• 11 years ago

A lot of sysadmin stuff is really well supported in Perl. However, I do a lot of sysadmin work and I've never learned Perl. I use shell scripts, awk, sed, et. al, and when necessary to go beyond that I'll reach for Python (or lately, Ansible) because I find it so much more readable.

I have no plans to look at Perl 6.

hahainternet11• 11 years ago

Your whole post is you pointing out that you are willfully ignorant. Congratulations.

gpvos• 11 years ago

You are not answering any part of the question.

jeffdavis• 11 years ago

Listing features is a bad way to choose a language[1].

Program something in it, and if you get a good feeling, then probably a lot of other people will too, and the language will take off.

Larry Wall is a linguist, and I think that is probably what sets perl apart more than anything.

But yes, it happens to have the kitchen sink, too.

[1] Unless you have hard requirements, like control over memory or runtime environment.

incepted• 11 years ago

Larry Wall is a linguist, and I think that is probably what sets perl apart more than anything.

He's also pretty good at telling jokes, which explains a lot of things about Perl ;-)

giaour2• 11 years ago

Multiple dispatch in a scripting language is enough to make me take a serious look at Perl.

The versioning was weird, but it could have been worse. At least they didn't take the PHP option and leap from v5 to v7 because the number 6 was cursed.

dragonwriter5• 11 years ago

Naive question time. Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be looking into?

As a non-Perl dev who has been looking into Perl 6 after encountering some posts and samples, I'd say it is, though unfortunately the kind of documentation that would make the most interesting bits easily approachable is still somewhat lacking.

hahainternet11• 11 years ago

unfortunately the kind of documentation that would make the most interesting bits easily approachable is still somewhat lacking.

Can you be more explicit? I'm not a Perl 6 dev but I would love to help adoption and I'm not so bad at documentation.

vram22• 11 years ago

Partly off-topic, but the Perl documentation used to be really, really good - around Perl 4.x or early 5.x or so. (Not saying it is worse now, just have't looked at it after that.) There used to be (either one or many) PDF files, that had info on pretty much any aspect of the language. The PDFs also looked very good. Excellent font. Not a typography expert, just going by the impression it made on me.

logicallee2• 11 years ago

Given that perl 6 is compatibility breaking, we can category say that if it is not something non-Perl developers should be looking into, it has utterly failed: it means you've made a completely new language nobody should use who isn't already using it!

that said, I don't think it's failing by this metric.

marcosdumay2• 11 years ago

Exploiting a post with this question, as somebody who knows Perl 5, I'd like to ask people that knows Perl 6:

Will I be able to write a dictionary of dictionaries or arrays without looking at the documentation every time? Did Perl 6 syntax for references got sane?

ugexe• 11 years ago

That depends on the person. I imagine anyone who looks at the docs for a few minutes would have a pretty good idea for themselves

esaym2• 11 years ago

I really don't have any idea what you are talking about..

Are you talking about something like this:

  $hash_of_hash = {
    hash1 => {key1 => 'value1'},
    hash2 => {key1 => 'value1'}
  };
  say $hash_of_hash->{hash1}{key1};

Seems easy to me...

I think reference syntax in Perl6 is gone. Which personally I don't like.

grondilu6• 11 years ago

I totally understand your question, as I was struggling to do this kind of things in Perl 5 some time ago. I hear that it's been made easier in Perl 5 lately, though. In any case, it's indeed much easier in Perl 6, as in Perl 6, there is no more references, or rather, everything is a reference.

so for instance a dictionary of dictionaries or arrays looks like:

    my %dict = {
       'foo' => {
                    'bar' => [ 'an', 'array' ],
                    'a deeply nested word' => "tada!"
               },
       'an empty dict' => {},
       'an empty array' => []
    };
    say %dict{'foo'}{'a deeply nested word'};  # tada!

muraiki• 11 years ago

Although I program in Perl 5 professionally, I think that Perl 6 is something that non-Perl developers should look into. While it's true that P6 draws inspiration from a variety of languages and techniques, from Smalltalk through Reactive Extensions and more, a laundry list of features is not necessarily the best reason to adopt a language -- especially one with a small ecosystem.

Instead, I think that P6 is worth looking at because of the "feel" of the language, or perhaps another way to put it is the way that all the pieces fit together. I found it easy to do the following in Perl 6:

1. Quickly write a small proof of concept program

2. Heavily use concurrent and asynchronous code in a way that "just works"

3. Fluidly mix imperative, functional reactive, and object oriented code

4. Add types for safe refactoring / further development

Even though Perl 6 still abides by TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) there was "something" that gave a consistency to all of the above. Or perhaps, nothing felt bolted on, which is perhaps a luxury of essentially starting from scratch. :)

Perl 6 is not only fun to write, but also easy to read (once you of course learn the syntax, which is quite different coming from not-perl). My hope is that the ease of using its OO features and type system will help avoid the "hash-of-who-knows-what" problem.

Lately the two languages I most enjoy using are Perl 6 and Go, which would appear to be almost total opposites! But they both have that "something" that just feels great to write. This is of course subjective, but I hope it's helpful somehow.

athenot• 11 years ago

Regarding versioning, it seems Perl did the same trick as Mac OS, minus the marketing part. From Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, there was a total rewrite (which was originally planned for OS 8 but got delayed until NeXT saved the day). Switching from 10 to X (besides the unix/NeXT allusion) was a great way to remove focus on the major release number and shift it to the minor one.

So look at it as Perl VI, minor version 0. :)

Perl6's main strength and which makes it "fun" is that it is multi-paradigm. It supports many ways of approaching a problem, instead of forcing a particular model. So you get a toolbox instead of just a modular hammer.

jjn10563• 11 years ago

I would say its sorta like what Apple did, except Perl5 is still production ready and in active development. Although Perl6 has the Perl label for historical reasons and out of respect to Larry Wall, Perl5 and Perl6 are considered distinct languages by their respective communities and each has an independent development track. Even after Perl6 considers itself version 1 complete, Perl5 will continue to be worked on, and in fact it will continue to be the only version of Perl with a full library of tools and jobs available.

latj• 11 years ago

What is confusing about 5 and 6?

greyman• 11 years ago

That it looks like a new improved version, while in reality it is basically a completely new language.

sampo• 11 years ago

Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be looking into?

Perl5 was feeling the weight of its humble origins as a small language for scripts, designed in the 80's. All that $@%<>$_ syntax, and bad support for keeping larger programs clean and organized.

Python's main selling point was: like Perl, but cleaner syntax and object system is in-build, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Also Ruby's selling point was: Perl, flexible for meta-language hacking like Perl, but cleaner syntax and in-build object system, also not as restrictive as Python.

Now Perl6 has everything that at a time made Python or Ruby feel more modern than Perl5, and more, even optional typing. (Well, it doesn't have Python's opinionated restrictiveness.) Of course at the moment, Perl6 doesn't have the huge selection of libraries that Python and Ruby have at the moment.

I don't know what, if anything, is a good reason for you to learn a new language. But while in the trio perl5,python,ruby perl5 was the most dated, old-feeling language, now in the trio perl6,python,ruby Perl6 is now the most modern in its design.

dragonwriter5• 11 years ago

Of course at the moment, Perl6 doesn't have the huge selection of libraries that Python and Ruby have at the moments.

Well, there is Inline::Python...

reality_czech• 11 years ago

The goal of Perl 6 is to pull together many different things. The clarity of the original Perl, the ease-of-use of Java, the community size of experimental languages like Self, the raw performance of Bash scripting, and the safety of C++. If that's a combination that appeals to you, then go for it.

Estragon• 11 years ago

The clarity of the original Perl

This was not its reputation BITD.

dTal• 11 years ago

SARCASM ALERT WOOP WOOP

jibalt2• 11 years ago

If intellectual dishonesty appeals to you ... well, you went for it.

vshjxyz• 11 years ago

I would suggest you to use Perl only if you have a dmc delorean that can jump 20-30 years back when reaching 88mph

I personally avoid it like a disease... Python + Ruby + JS are wayyy more used and future proof

autarch3• 11 years ago

Author here. I appreciate the traffic but my server doesn't. I'm working on getting this viewable again.

landr0id• 11 years ago

Want to put an archive.is link up to lighten the load?

autarch3• 11 years ago

https://archive.is/UudBe

autarch3• 11 years ago

See https://archive.is/UudBe for a cached version until my server stops blowing up.

atrust4• 11 years ago

I loved Perl 5. Now when Perl 6 is out, I'm a bit confused about versioning. As far as I understand, perl 6 files are of .pl6 extension. Why would that be different from regular .pl, giving that it's just a new version of a language? I mean, I have never seen things like .js5, .php6, etc. Next, is `use v6;` mandatory? Quite confusing. Am I allowed to do `use v2;`?

grondilu6• 11 years ago

The extension is not mandatory. Usually people use .p6, but you can also use .pl . Notice that I've never seen .pl6.

'use v6;' is not mandatory either, but it allows your program to display an helpful error message if you try to run it with the perl 5 interpreter. Try "perl -e 'use v6;'", you should get:

    Perl v6.0.0 required--this is only v5.20.2, stopped at -e line 1.
    BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.

'use v2;' will not run with the Perl 6 interpreter, but 'use v5;' will work, as the Perl 6 interpreter is specced to be able to run Perl 5, albeit with certain limitations (no XS, for instance).

atrust4• 11 years ago

Understood. Thanks! I might have confused .p6 with .pl6. Thanks for the clarification on that.

cygx7• 11 years ago

Notice that I've never seen .pl6

Check your Rakudo's tools folder.

zoffix222• 11 years ago

Your confusion lies in thinking, as you've said, "just a new version of a language." It's actually been a long, 15-year journey that resulted in a completely brand new language. The name is still 'Perl 6' for historical reasons, but it may as well be called 'Rakudo'; something people've not heard of yet. The Perl 5 language is still being developed and improved, with a major release every year. Hence, the filename distinction.

However, it's just a convention. You can have any extension you like (at least on *nix).

And to answer your question, no "use v6" is not mandatory. It's there so if you run your script with a perl (and not perl6) interpreter, you won't get confusing errors.

atrust4• 11 years ago

Of course one can have any extension. Not that it's a bad thing to use .p6. I was just trying to make it clear for myself to understand how beneficial the new extension is. Part of that lies in "marketing" the language. Old school engineers may still want to use .pl, whereas newbies will follow the documentation and have their files prefixed with .p6. My worry is that such behavior may lead to a confusion in Open Source world and push away newcomers from using the language.

I've been following the journey for, more or less, the past 10 years. I hope that whoever spent those 15 years on developing Perl 6, will reap the rewards.

cygx7• 11 years ago

I have never seen things like .js5, .php6, etc.

Some Fortran people do it.

MadcapJake5• 11 years ago

`use v6;` actually means "use the latest version of Perl 6". I believe you can even do `use v6.b` and other versions to target specific releases of Perl 6, though I'm not sure if that's implemented yet.

Some text editors also will change to a Perl 6 highlighter if this pragma is present.

_pmf_2• 11 years ago

(I just asked on stackoverflow, but I'l try here again:)

Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based, I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM, but could not find anything.

Does someone know whether this is possible?

cygx7• 11 years ago

Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based

The JVM is just one of the backends, but it's fallen a bit by the wayside during the current effort to get 6.0 out on MoarVM.

I expected that there's some interoperability layer for the host JVM

There is, but I'm unaware of proper documentation. For now, you might want to take a look at https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/t/03-jvm/01-intero...

_pmf_2• 11 years ago

Ah, thanks for clearing this up!

kbenson16• 11 years ago

Rakudo isn't JVM "based", but the JVM is one VM that it targets (also MoarVM, and Parrot. I imagine at some point the .Net CLR will be added). That said, take a look at this[1].

1: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-p...

dragonwriter5• 11 years ago

There was Parrot support, but AFAIK its been dead since February.

MadcapJake5• 11 years ago

Also JavaScript is in the works! http://blogs.perl.org/users/pawel_murias/2015/11/what-should...

dragonwriter5• 11 years ago

Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based

Insofar as there is a "Rakudo VM", its MoarVM, which is not JVM-based; Rakudo also compiles for the JVM, and there's some documentation on interop floating around, but most of it seems to be both old and indicating that the JVM interop was in flux at the time.

giancarlostoro2• 11 years ago

One question I haven't seen asked in this particular thread is, can it be used in production? What type of ecosystem is available (something like CPAN) for Perl 6 and how reliable is it? Two questions I suppose, but I guess the first one is more important.

Edit:

What I really mean by "can it be used in production" is really: is anyone using it in production and what is their experience with it and their recommendations?

justinator6• 11 years ago

I think we're all waiting with baited breath for Perl 6.Stable to be released. Hopefully that'll be around Perl 6.Christmas.

For now, it's fun to see what the future will bring. I'm excited.

jjn10563• 11 years ago

I'm totally not waiting. This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' It wasn't all those years ago, and won't be in Jan 2016 either. No jobs, no deep libraries, no SDK support... The list is unending. If we'd put 1/10 the time into minor improvements to perl5 over the past 15 years we'd have most of what people seem to like about Perl6 in a language you can actually get a job. Instead we have two languages with no future instead of one...

kbenson16• 11 years ago

I know someone who is a Software Reliability Engineer at Google (sysadmin on steroids is my interpretation of the position) that's written a few back-end tools in it, and I think those were likely shared with his department. So there's that.

pearjuice• 11 years ago

Perl
fun

Pick one and choose wisely.

unixhero2• 11 years ago

Am I the only one to have noticed?

PERL is a shuffling of REPL

justinator6• 11 years ago

This is a bit pedantic, but you wouldn't write about Perl in all caps, as it's not actually an acronym (but it is a backronym)

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-differenc...

Welcome to the Perl subculture!

unixhero2• 11 years ago

Not pedantic enough. You didn't comment on Perl being a backronym for REPL! I can't find anything out there about this either. It must therefore only be me :).

Welcome to the Perl subculture! I was at the time also in the Slackware subculture, Church of the subgenious. It got very foobar.

Tried learning Perl since highschool, it was too much of a mindF* for me to get going with. chomp? regex! Phew.

Maybe with Perl6, it's time.

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

How is Perl6 overcoming the problems that python3 is facing in moving people over from one version to the next?

MadcapJake5• 11 years ago

The situation is really quite different. Perl 6 is a sister language, Perl 5 is still quite actively being developed, and the wait has certainly made many hesitant to begin upgrading. One thing to keep in mind is that Python 2 is just now finally starting to wane, so I am guessing that if Perl 5 does end up going the way of Python 2, it won't be for quite some time.

Perl 6 is fun

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