Perl 6 Released

https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/

by e15ctr0n • 11 years ago

432 185 11 years ago

perl6advent.wordpress.com

marshray• 11 years ago

On behalf of a long time onlooker: Congratulations, Perl 6!

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

Thank you!

danso• 11 years ago

Congrats! The new regex features sound exciting ("Dramatically reforms and sets a new standard in regex syntax, which scales up to full grammars – powerful enough to parse Perl 6 itself")

I really liked the post that precedes the submitted one, in which Perl 6 is described as a teenager being adopted into a family, "An Unexpectedly Long-expected Party" https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/an-unexpectedly...

Aardwolf• 11 years ago

And also interesting unicode features in the regexes... \d matches anything that is a digit in unicode for example. What if you only want ascii though, like for computer languages and maybe security?

EDIT: security as in, no similar-looking but different characters to confuse users etc...

gkya• 11 years ago

Guess one can always do [0-9]+. Though I can't see why, for example, an arabic numeral pose a security problem. ISIS?

unixhero• 11 years ago

Learn X in Y Minutes[0] is a fresh and quick intro to Perl6. It looks jolly good, readable(!) and quite fun! I hope I get to work on a project in Perl6.

[0] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl6/

guelo• 11 years ago

Also http://perl6intro.com/ is a good intro.

woah• 11 years ago

First thing I read is:

    #`(
      Multiline comments use #` and a quoting construct.
      (), [], {}, 「」, etc, will work.
    )

This level of flexibility in how you make comments seems a bit... odd

unfamiliar• 11 years ago

I guess the intention is to let you use whatever form of parenthesis inside the comment without causing problems.

Ulti5• 11 years ago

Quoting is highly generalised in Perl 6. Comments happen to be more feature rich and dynamic than other languages. They aren't simply ignored by the compiler but completely parsed and used in a variety of ways. The flexibility looks odd because it's meant more for quoted string interpolation, but reuses the same mechanism for comments. Generality of concepts is a common theme throughout Perl 6, if something looks round and spins it should be a wheel.

For example all of the literate style POD6 comments are accessible within a variable as a fully structured tree in the $=pod variable. The 'q' quoting context in the main language allows you to use any matched quote/bracket from unicode as the markers of the start and end of a string or regex, or comments as you've picked up on.

This is super helpful if you want all sorts of weird quotes and brackets inside of a string and still have it interpolated for variables for example.

    say q⧚This string has a "'weirdly quoted bit in'"!⧛;

Will print out:

    This string has a "'weirdly quoted bit in'"!

To see some examples of how extreme you can have these characters be from unicode check out http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_matching_brackets.html

SwellJoe11• 11 years ago

Perl 6 sort of set itself up for a tremendous uphill battle. By taking so long to "firm up", in terms of specification (or the test suite, in this case), while Perl 5 had a period of neglect, it lost a whole bunch of its early momentum to other languages. Sometimes, former Perl programmers have passed through two or three other languages as their "primary" language since they last called Perl home (I know there are several formerly reasonably well-known Perl folks who are more known now for their involvement in JavaScript, Go, or Haskell, or Rust, etc.).

It would take a ridiculously advanced language to counter that turning of the tides. Luckily (or, I guess, not due to luck but because Perl 6 developers realized they had to deliver something amazing to justify the time lost in the wilderness), Perl 6 is a ridiculously advanced language.

I haven't started a new project in Perl in several years (though my primary projects, which have existed for 9-17 years, are in Perl), but I'm strongly considering making my next project a Perl 6 project. It looks like a really fun language. All the stuff I like about Perl, with almost none of the stuff I don't, plus some advanced stuff that I don't even know enough to know why I might want it. But, I know that Higher Order Perl for Perl 5 (which I actually read while I was mostly working in Python) was a lot of fun and made me a better programmer, so I assume Perl 6 and its new paradigms will be similarly eye-opening.

monk_e_boy3• 11 years ago

Happened to me, had to choose a language to write a web crawler in ended up with Python (this was 5 or 6 years ago.)

We got a contractor in who was a Perl guru, he wrote one of the popular web frameworks but even he couldn't put forwards a good case for using it over PHP.

And now in the company my brother works for (a cloud hosting provider) they are currently switching from Perl to Python.

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

one of the popular web frameworks

Which?

Natsu• 11 years ago

I'd have thought that the security record of PHP would give Perl the edge, but perhaps that wasn't evaluated.

visarga• 11 years ago

I too have to learn Python for the machine learning libraries. CPAN has very little ML.

singingfish3• 11 years ago

Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills in perl are too much in demand, and b. Because for most of my normal work I haven't found anything perl can't do as easily or easier than other tools yet) here's my semi-considered opinion.

Meh, all the dynamic languages are basically the same. They're all basically things that manpipulate strings and C pointers. For perl/python/ruby/js here's what I'd sort of recommend:

* Pick from your team's strength, unless:

* Lots of turnkey logic, code quality and debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP.

* Lots of turnkey logic, per-performance isn't a problem and you want some higher order programming capability: Ruby.

* You want to manage a java-like large team for not so trivial logic, and you prioritise uniformity over expressivity. Python. Also python is a good environment for academic work as it helps the academic programmers not shoot themselves in the foot so much and academic code is a mess. Which is why python is such a good extension language for other tools.

* Async greenfield stuff where you don't need to worry about external libraries much: javascript. Also the only game in town for web front ends (plus its transpiling friends). Javascript is like a syntatically impoverished perl in this regard.

* You've got a whole bunch of mess in business logic and/or systems logic that you need to encapsulate, and you've got a small highly capable team who want to prioritise expressivity over uniformity. Perl excels here. So does python, but it'll make you do even more horrible things papering over the mess.

Regarding the last point, I believe if it reaches a tipping point perl 6 will be a good thing for async, multicore and parsing related stuff, and should be long-term productive and reduce the requirement for having as highly capable and a disciplined team that is really a requirement for non-trivial perl5 code bases.

Also perl5 is second to none for programming language back compat. I had a decent sized non-trivial project I'd written for internal (research) purposes, then neglected for several years. Then I had to look at the running code again. I'd been through several minor OS upgrades, moved to a completely different OS and gone through at least three major versions of perl. Aside from a couple of missing CPAN modules that I had forgotten about in the Makefile.PL, everything was fine out of the box.

kev0092• 11 years ago

This is probably one of the best unintended things to ever happen. Using other languages is the equivalent of world travel for a human. All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers, and perl is among the top of that category for a variety of reasons. I have seen maintainable, performant perl5, but the barrier is high.

SwellJoe11• 11 years ago

That's a nice way of looking at the brain drain in the Perl community over the last decade. And, you're probably right. If we think in terms of general health of the free and open programming world, it has been remarkably improved by some of the folks who've migrated through different languages over the years. To the point where we have not one, not two, not a dozen, really nice languages with excellent communities, but several dozens of them (and at least two dozen that are large enough and effective enough to build pretty much anything with them). We have an embarrassment of riches, frankly.

There was a time when going into a large project, you could choose between Java, C/C++, or Perl. There were outliers (even some with significant footholds in some industries, like TCL), but those were the options I saw in front of me at every junction. Today, we can choose to work in so many languages, and get good results, find good community, find good library and tooling and cross-platform support, and enjoy all the stuff we found so nice about Perl way back when.

pron• 11 years ago

All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers

Some of the worst code I've seen was written by people who think the choice of programming language matters all that much (the rest was written by beginners or physicists).

devit• 11 years ago

How is it really advanced?

I was under the impression that it's just another dynamic scripting language semantically equivalent to Perl5, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so on.

And obviously new languages of this kind aren't going to be very successful or interesting because knowing and using JavaScript is going to be mandatory forever due to browsers and with Babel and ES6/7 it's as good as any other such language.

Plus in addition to JavaScript, Ruby, Python and PHP have a lot of momentum as well.

tracker14• 11 years ago

I wouldn't discount language advances, there's kind of a Renaissance happening with languages the past couple years... even newer options Closure/ClosureScript along with new looks at Erlang, Haskell, F# etc... and JS bringing in new patterns.

WebAssembly will offer many options as browser adoption happens and cross-compilation with support for source maps is becoming very common as well.

I'm a fan of JS and ES5/7 in particular... that doesn't mean that other options won't take root. JS has plenty of advantages in that it's the same code client/server, less disconnect in objects, serialization constructs built in (JSON), easy translation to/from dbms (no ORM needed), etc. Just the same, a decade ago, everyone avoided JS like the plague.

godzillabrennus• 11 years ago

Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6 in my lifetime? Next thing you'll know we will have cold fusion.

floatboth• 11 years ago

And TextMate Forever, er, 2. Is Half-Life 3 next?

pyre5• 11 years ago

Don't get ahead of yourself, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 needs to come out first. :P

krylon2• 11 years ago

A couple of years I had a nice talk about operating systems with a couple of pretty smart people (smarter than me, at least). I remember bringing up GNU Hurd and saying how sad I was it still wasn't there, yet. And somebody else said to look at it in a more positive way, because by the time it would be ready, at least I could run Perl 6 and Duke Nukem Forever on it.

So who knows, maybe we'll see Hurd 1.0 before, say, 2020. ;-)

Ulti5• 11 years ago

Maybe they'll rewrite Hurd in Perl 6...

schoen• 11 years ago

NetHack 3.6 just recently came out too!

http://www.nethack.org/v360/release.html

szatkus• 11 years ago

SuperTux 0.4.0

What a time to be alive!

http://supertuxproject.org/

SwellJoe11• 11 years ago

I'm hopeful that Perl 6 will prove more endearing and long-lasting than Duke Nukem Forever, which was, frankly, a stinker (then again, we all grew up waiting for it, and Duke's 12 year old boy humor does not age gracefully).

nice_byte• 11 years ago

Please. Next logical step is Half Life 3 :)

sofaofthedamned• 11 years ago

How many times is it going to be posted on HN that Perl 6 is released?!

cosarara97• 11 years ago

This time it's for real!

xaduha4• 11 years ago

Not quite too, it's a compiler release (Rakudo), but ordinary users should stick to a distribution with common modules (Rakudo Star). Usually comes a few days after.

Ulti5• 11 years ago

Once? This is the only time there has been a release of a versioned specification for the language compilers can target. That's what has been in development for 15 years! The specification of the actual language. It's like the difference between JavaScript existing as a language for a while and then one day ECMAScript 1 was defined. Apart from Perl 6 was always about the evolution of the spec with various implementations showing the way.

The first major implementation of Perl 6 back in the early/mid 00s was Pugs written in Haskell where Perl 6 picked up a tonne of functional heritage both in the compiler at the time and the language spec. The more recent Rakudo compiler has a lead architect who often works in C# where the compiler and the language spec picked up and redefined a reactive programming concurrency model with lots of nice new syntax like the react/whenever block.

Rakudo Perl 6 and Pugs and the host of other early implementations have been around a while and released often when they were worked on, monthly in the case of Rakudo with the first publicised release in 2010. Rakudo is also releasing a version of the compiler compliant with the newly frozen and released specification.

pyre5• 11 years ago

I think that the parent to your post is referring to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793029

which already made the front-page.

krylon2• 11 years ago

Well, after all these years, I think that's okay. Some people probably need to hear it a couple of times for the good news to sink in. :-)

anonbanker• 11 years ago

it's that important.

jakejake• 11 years ago

I don't even know what it means to say that Perl 6 has been released anymore.

dang• 11 years ago

Well, it is the release of Perl 6, and the appetite appears insatiable, so have at it. But after this one, let's flag any more reposts.

kriro• 11 years ago

Perl was probably the first language I did interesting stuff in (yay IRC-bots, who didn't write one in Perl) but I gradually moved on to other languages. I didn't keep up with it at all, only knew that Perl6 took forever. Then I read up on Perl6 and now I'm really excited about the language. One of the projects I want to work on involves building a DSL, most likely an external one. I was pretty set on using ANTLR4 for it but now I'm seriously thinking about Perl6 as that seems to be one of the strength of the language.

Ulti5• 11 years ago

Guess what you can do both at the same time! :D There is already a module which converts an ANTLR4 grammar into a full Perl 6 grammar which then provides a ready made parser for you :) https://github.com/drforr/perl6-ANTLR4

carlosrg• 11 years ago

Perl was probably the first language I did interesting stuff in but I gradually moved on to other languages

Same here. But recently I had to convert a strange proprietary file format from a poll into CSV for a personal project of mine, and I decided to use Perl (5) just for nostalgia sake. I got a solution in minutes despite not having used Perl in years and I enjoyed programming on it, I'd say more than Python and sometimes bash which are my go-to scripting languages. Perl is the kind of language that you enjoy using for quick but effective hacks, maybe because it doesn't get in your way. Definitely I'm going to use it more.

bitmadness• 11 years ago

Too little, too late, IMO. The world has moved to Ruby and Go for the web/cloud and Python for data analysis/scientific computing.

Ulti5• 11 years ago

Ruby and Go for the web?? Really? Not JavaScript and PHP (still). Python is old hat too it's all about Julia now :P and R is making a come back in some weird computing renaissance.

benbristow• 11 years ago

Ruby is very popular with the excellent Rails framework. Also Sinatra as a DSL if the power of Rails isn't needed.

noblethrasher2• 11 years ago

Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby.

WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME.

JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml.

iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language.

This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

draw_down2• 11 years ago

The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for fifteen years.

lmm6• 11 years ago

Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby.

How are they feeling about that decision now?

WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME.

Sure, because Java is the only option on those platforms.

JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml.

OCaml hasn't hit its peak yet, it's still on the way (slowly) up.

iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language.

Again, because it's the only option on the platform.

This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

How're they feeling about that decision now?

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

The 20-year-old Ruby and Python were brand new at some point in time too. It's a bit silly to declare the current crop of languages to be with us forever. I can already notice where being a brand new language makes Perl 6 address new inventions in the past 20 years much better: superb Unicode support and getting concurrency by simply using .hyper/.race methods, not to mention grammars and autothreaded junctions. This looks pretty revolutionary to me.

EugeneOZ• 11 years ago

Few hipsters is not a "world", world is much bigger.

doodpants• 11 years ago

We will continue to ship monthly releases, which will continue to improve performance and our user’s experience.

Is that a Freudian slip? Do they really only have one user? :-)

cokebot90002• 11 years ago

Ugh, good catch. Looks like someone fixed it up already, thanks.

hercynium2• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a friend whose band cut an album back before anybody could do it, and got a local music chain to put them on the shelves. A month later, he bought a single copy from that store, explaining, "I just wanted to double my record sales"

gabesullice• 11 years ago

Didn't quite make it by Christmas

colomon• 11 years ago

You might want to read the date on the article...

cokebot90002• 11 years ago

I can vouch that that there was plenty of Christmas left in my timezone when I uploaded the tarballs and posted the release notice. :)

sampo• 11 years ago

In about half of the countries in Europe, Christmas is generally taken to mean the Christmas Eve, i.e. the 24th.

3dfan2• 11 years ago

Variable names can contain dashes?

Then how do you know what this means:

    users=users-churn-rate*time

oh, i see ... they are prefixed with $. so it's:

    $users=$users-$churn-rate*$time

Hm... still a bit confusing. But ok. It can be avoided by avoiding dashes in variable names.

pyre5• 11 years ago

I could craft you unreadable code in any language. Someone removing all of the whitespace between their operators is not going to be producing code that I want to be responsible for maintaining... in any language.

sirclueless• 11 years ago

Go has an interesting take on whitespace-around-operators -- it starts removing whitespace around binary operators if there are higher precedence operators in the same expression. So, for example, you get:

    x = 2 * y
    x = 2*y + 5

This is pretty readable. In fact I think it is more readable than the usual convention of "spaces around every binary operator," but it would be untenable without the existence of gofmt. The most common argument against a convention like this is, "subtle bugs will be introduced if the actual precedence is different than the one implied by whitespace," which is why it's great to have a benevolent formatting overlord telling you when or not your formatting is consistent.

wtetzner• 11 years ago

...or you could just put whitespace around - when you mean subtract.

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

I found dashes are by far easier to type than underscores and I'd certainly have whitespace between operators in my code, so I'd never run into the problem you describe. It is possible to have variables without sigils and in that case, your first example would be a parse error about undeclared users-churn-rate. Also, apostrophes are valid in variable names as well.

3dfan2• 11 years ago

    your first example would be a parse error about undeclared users-churn-rate

What if users is 10 and churn-rate is 3 and i want to substract the churn-rate from users?

mbrock• 11 years ago

That's been a non-issue for Lisp since 1958...

_yosefk• 11 years ago

Lisp is infix though so it's (- some-name other-name), not $some-name-$other-name. I think the former is slightly more readable than (- some_name other_name), while the latter is slightly less readable than $some_name-$other_name.

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

Something I see no one mentioned, dashes (and apostrophes) aren't the only neat thing you can use in term names. You can use other languages too. $контрольная-работа is a valid variable name.

tlikonen• 11 years ago

That's nice. Common Lisp implementations, too, allow any characters in symbol names, even spaces and the empty string. Javascript allows wide character set too. I think it's good that languages break out of [a-zA-Z_-]. That said, I'd use pretty limited charset in internationally developed multi-OS code base. People have different keyboards, input systems, knowledge etc.

collyw5• 11 years ago

That's something I wouldn't like to see in source code, as I wouldn't have a clue how to type it. How do Russians see that issue? (Is it Russian?)

Ultimatt9• 11 years ago

It's not that common variable names use dash in the wild. Far more common is method names do. In part because of this clash but also to distinguish method names. Also jees use whitespace!! Assuming that was a serious question.

pronik3• 11 years ago

Having programmed in Perl for a couple of years and later in Python and JavaScript, I really started to appreciate sigils. There is literally no ambiguity about what's a variable name and what not. Things like reserved words (think JavaScript's commonly used 'klass' monstrosity) are just a non-issue in Perl.

scriptdevil2• 11 years ago

I installed rakudo and played with it a little. However, the repl was horrible. Is there a repl that accepts multiline subroutines and if possible readline support?

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

I think you may want to install the module called Linenoise. If you have panda (Perl 6 module installer), just type panda install Linenoise and you should be all set. https://github.com/hoelzro/p6-linenoise

scriptdevil2• 11 years ago

Yeah, that fixes the readline situation. Still, if has to type everything in one line for it to evaluate, the REPL isn't of much use is it?

julianpye2• 11 years ago

My first thought for Perl 6 killerapp: a html5/js build replacement for grunt, gulp and other such monstrosities.

DCoder3• 11 years ago

You can write a replacement for gulp in Perl 6, but if it doesn't have the plugins, who will use it?

Grunt and gulp have huge plugin ecosystems, which is both a blessing (you can find ready-made plugins for a lot of tasks) and a curse (everything moves very rapidly, plugins get abandoned, blacklisted and superseded all the time - if you want to compile TypeScript files, half the blogposts will recommend gulp-tsc .. but wait, it's been blacklisted, you should use gulp-typescript instead ).

Grunt: ~5400 plugins: http://gruntjs.com/plugins

Gulp: ~2000 plugins: http://gulpjs.com/plugins/

Gulp's list of blacklisted plugins: https://github.com/gulpjs/plugins/blob/master/src/blackList....

deniska• 11 years ago

I personally like the idea of using good old Make for that task. You don't need "huge plugin ecosystem", you just need executables to use it. And unlike many other systems it does incremental builds without any special machinery.

Kabacaru2• 11 years ago

Also think of your target audience. All of them can program in JavaScript more or less, not all of them will want to learn Perl to do something they can do without learning a new language.

julianpye2• 11 years ago

How many of the plugins do you use and how many are overengineered for a simple purpose?

lmm6• 11 years ago

grunt/gulp/etc. have better alternatives in many languages. The reason they're popular is they're written in javascript, so people working in javascript can have their build configured in the same language as the rest of their project.

tarikjn• 11 years ago

No need for a new DSL for js package management, most of the projects which use grunt/gulp should just be using npm package.json's scripts. If you need to do complex builds use a Makefile. The most established build DSL is bash and it still does the job better on most aspects than grunt/gulp.

mintplant• 11 years ago

Are there any good tutorials/introductions/blog posts/etc. on using Perl6 for language parsing/implementation?

cygx3• 11 years ago

For Perl6 proper, not that I'm aware of. For the NQP toolchain in which Rakudo Perl6 is implemented, there's https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp-internals-course

BuckRogers• 11 years ago

I can't say I'll be using Perl6 for my next project, but I'm glad it's here because it should push other languages forward in meaningful ways. I think the PL landscape has been missing something and Perl6 was it.

cies• 11 years ago

I'm really excited about Perl6, it is so jam packed with interesting novel features, that it serves as an amazing testbed for stretching the limits of what programming languages are capable of. I always feel that Ruby was a language that came out of Perl; a subset of it's features, carefully selected and implemented with the knowledge of what did not go too well with Perl. This might just happen again with Perl 6, judging from the exotic features it brings together.

Thanks Larry and co! So this Christmas it did happen :)

meesterdude• 11 years ago

Perl was the very first language I learned. I was using it to parse incoming emails to insert records into a timetracking database, so i could log my time via email. loved it.

But ya know, 15 years is a long time. in fact i was around 16 at the time, and am 30 now, and remember talk about perl 6.

I'm a ruby guy now, and I don't see how I could ever go back to perl. Is perl 7 going to take another 15? or 30?

Despite whatever features came about; i should not need to wait half my life to get them. That I think reflects poorly on the perl culture, or its momentum. And it's not that perl 5 was without issues (though they were rare for me)

Maybe a revival will come about from this, and maybe a change of pace and approach; but as it stands the 15 years it took to release feels closer to failure than to a success, and to tie my code to such neglected foundations does not jive with me. Or maybe I just really like ruby now.

Honestly, I hope something good comes of it. Even if its just new features that other languages go on to adopt or take cues from.

devdas• 11 years ago

Perl 5 is still around and being developed.

Perl 6 is a different language.

zoffix2229• 11 years ago

I don't think Perl 7 will be a thing in anyone's planned future. There are now two languages in the Perl family: Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 5 is still developed, has yearly releases and feature additions. Perl 6 is a brand new language that just had its first release. There is some history involved in why it took 15 years and why it's named "Perl" and not something else, but it's an entirely new language.

Ultimatt9• 11 years ago

There is no Perl 7. Perl 5 has been having releases the whole time you've been doing Ruby. Each minor release of Perl 5 since 5.10 had major features comparable to Python 2 to 3 but with full backwards compatibility. Perl 6 is a whole new language. There is no plan for a Perl 7 instead like Smalltalk and friends Perl 6 will just endlessly bootstrap itself to the next generation with its MOP and grammar engine.

xorcist2• 11 years ago

IPv6 was over 20 years in the making. When will we get IPv7

Internetworking is clearly something of a failure.

lmm6• 11 years ago

Many people do think IPv6 is a failure - it's certainly not an unambiguous success. IPv4 has continued popularity in a way that perl5... doesn't.

bane2• 11 years ago

This is impossibly exciting. Most people don't realize it yet, but it's like a programming language hand grenade just went off in the world...little bits of the new paradigms in Perl 6 are going to start winding their way into languages of the future.

I first remember learning about rumors around the development of Perl 6 about the time I picked up Perl 5 for the first time. I had been doing a bunch of C and C++ code (and a smattering of Java) up to that point, but coding in Perl was like hitting the idea accelerator. At the time (programming resources on the Internet were few and far between) I didn't even know where to look to find resources to do things in C++ that were quick one-off scripts in Perl. Need CGI? No problem. Mucking around with a database, here ya go.

I jettisoned C++ and dove heavily into Perl for years after that. I'm pretty sure that Perl made me a much worse programmer (it turns laziness into a kind of opiate), but a better conceptual developer -- I now had a much better idea of what computers could do, and didn't have to reinvent an entire civilization every time I wanted to do something (not a joke, where and when I worked, I was partially responsible for working on a pre-STL String library for C++, that's where we were in the world). Perl was really the first time I had encountered the productivity benefits a true high-level language could bring.

I've since abandoned Perl and have moved onto Python for day-to-day. There's lots of electrons spilled by many former Perlers who've made similar transitions. I've never really liked Python in the same way I liked writing Perl. With Python I've always felt like I'm assembling Tinker Toys or an erector set into a thing. It's quick to build and it works in the end but there's not much passion in it. With Perl I always felt like I was writing poetry -- code just sort of fell out of me.

I thought about checking out Go, but there's something about the sort of terse opinion the language designers have about the language that's made me feel like the entire language is a premature optimization that's going to go stale quick.

Perl 6 feels like we've just entered a new evolutionary period, where we've been given all new tools, where the opinion is careful inclusionism. It's like being stuck writing couplets and haiku in Perl 5 and now we can write anything.

Congratulations Larry et. al. This has been a long time coming, and I hope this is an amazing start!

trop• 11 years ago

All this progression rings true, but also the initial attraction of Perl. Back in the late '90s I used Perl at a job where everyone else worked in C. This was in the days that programmers of compiled languages were skeptical of interpreted languages. One day a friend invited me by where he worked, where the sysadmin was a "real computer guy". The sysadmin turned out to be a man with long hair and a long gray beard. He was using a very thin Sony laptop with Linux and a command-line TTY (he said he'd never bothered to install X-Windows) and after he deployed a new release of the company's code using a single command and started nmap running on the internal network (he wanted to see who else was running a Unix), he asked me what sort of programming I did. I was a bit cowed, and apologetically said that I didn't really program, I only did scripting in Perl. He looked at me in the eye for the first time and said, "Perl is most bodaciously a real programming language."

Seeing Perl 6 release notes like "Use of EVAL now requires a declaration of ‘use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL’" and "Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value" reminds me of the nerd coolness of Perl, so different from the straightforward sensible air of Python. I don't see many deep-hacker sysadmins these days, but I hope the excitement of Perl 6 can inspire some inefficiently marvelous coders...

tracker14• 11 years ago

Haven't looked at perl in quite a while... just seeing your comments on the release notes brings a smile to my eye... as opposed to JS not fixing the text strings to use UTF-8 from UCS16 as it might "break" something... as opposed to all the new and old code that behaves unexpectedly.

I always loved how simple it was to do simple things in perl... I've been hoping to find something I need go for, so I can actually dig into it... far more likely to find an excuse to use perl 6 sooner.

ttflee• 11 years ago

I have trouble learning Python for the past decade, after I learned Perl in order to deal with DNA sequences and BLAST APIs in college. Although its syntax is straight forward, I failed to find any inner feeling to comprehend it.

0xFFC• 11 years ago

I thought it is only me. I share exact same experience. After I programmed in Perl for almost 1.5 year.I switched to python for just fun . But I never comprehend deeply whats going on in python like I do in Perl , even though I have written advanced code in python.

Thiz• 11 years ago

I like what I see. Now make it available at Godaddy, Namecheap and all hosting providers for it to dethrone PHP as the king of the web.

SwellJoe11• 11 years ago

I think "king of the web" is gonna look a lot different in the future than it does today and did in the past. JavaScript will be, for the foreseeable future, the king of the web front end, and I suspect it'll also hold a strong role on the back end. It may even be unstoppable on both ends because of the incredible resources being thrown at it.

However, systems management, deployment, provisioning, data aggregation, log/event analysis, etc. on a large scale becomes more important by the day, and if there is an area where Perl is still quite popular, it is in those back end tasks. There are trendy tools in newer languages, but you'd be hard press to find very large deployments (at least on Linux or other UNIX) without a few hundred thousand lines of Perl running some elements.

Perl 6 with concurrency built-in, grammars and the most advanced regular expression engine in the world, seems very well-suited for that future. Being somewhat familiar for old school sysadmins who've always relied on Perl for their scripting tasks is a bonus (Python has made some inroads in that space in recent years, particularly with Red Hat and Ubuntu/Debian shipping many system utilities that are written in Python).

Anyway, on the web front, I think we need a reasonable database abstraction layer (e.g. Perl DBI/DBD), at the very least, before it gets elevated to "always available" on hosting providers. I'd say give it another year, and we'll have a pretty good Perl 6 web development ecosystem to work with.

Ultimatt9• 11 years ago

Perl 6 already has its own DBI and even a Slang DSL for writing SQL directly in Perl 6 as a loop construct. https://github.com/tony-o/perl6-slang-sql

nstart• 11 years ago

On a side note, I love how welcoming all the language is around getting people to join the community. Off to the irc we go :)

Sniffnoy• 11 years ago

This should be changed to the permalink: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is-he...

Kabacaru2• 11 years ago

I'm fairly disappointed with this release. My read through of a tutorial in it went something like this:

* Oh you're sticking with that confusing % for hashes, @ for arrays then $ for everything else... maybe maybe classes have been sorted out though.

* Hmm, why is the syntax for defining a class totally different to defining functions and variables everywhere else

* Well they can't have made anything WORSE. Oh fields can have minuses in them?? Packages exist and you can define them but you're not supposed to anymore?

* Well at least you can't totally rewrite the language in some arcane way which means every bit of perl you come across is totally different and unreadable for 45min while you work out what the custom DSL does. looks at phasers, Meta operators, fix'es sigh

Great that this has finally been released, but it really doesn't solve the problems that Perl always had that it is TOO expressive and too customisable, meaning it'll always be vastly different project to project. On top of that it doesn't have the things that people are really excited about now, which is channels, selects and other things that make async easy. I think that this would have been an amazing release when Ruby was getting popular, but I think it's a few years too late.

xorcist2• 11 years ago

Confusing? How would you signify context then? A keyword?

Ultimatt9• 11 years ago

Yeah I can tell you've now learnt enough of the language to judge it at all... Or perhaps not at all! http://docs.perl6.org/type/Channel Though supplies with react/whenever is a lot more exciting than channels.

raiph4• 11 years ago

Oh you're sticking with that confusing % for hashes, @ for arrays then $ for everything else...

The claim is something like:

Some folk like distinguishing singular ($foo) and plural (%dict, @array) nouns even if some others dislike it.

Many human languages make the same sorts of distinctions to good effect which may give you pause for thought, especially given recent neuroscience emphasizing the apparent central role of natural language processing rather than math processing when folk comprehend code (the study I saw involved Java code fwiw).

Note that you can bind a name to avoid sigils:

    my \foo = %;     # bind foo to an empty dict
    foo = :bar, :baz # foo now has two key/val pairs

> why is the syntax for defining a class totally different to defining functions and variables everywhere else

The claim is something like:

Perl / Perl 6 are more serious than most other langs about variable scoping. Classes aren't closures and object lifetimes are different from lexical variables'.

Oh fields can have minuses in them??

The claim is something like:

Many folk love that, eg lispers, and Perl isn't about telling experienced coders that they can not do things they consider elegant or useful.

Packages exist and you can define them but you're not supposed to anymore?

The claim is something like:

You generally don't need to use the 'package' keyword because keywords like 'class' and 'module' are themselves variants on 'package' and do the necessary work of the 'package' keyword for you.

Perhaps you've read some doc that was written by someone who was learning Perl 6 and for whom English is a second language such as the learnXinY?

Well at least you can't totally rewrite the language in some arcane way which means every bit of perl you come across is totally different and unreadable for 45min while you work out what the custom DSL does. looks at phasers, Meta operators, fix'es sigh

The claim is something like:

Perl 6 is a granularly malleable language. The features for empowering users to use this have been carefully designed to be sane but they can be abused.

On top of that it doesn't have the things that people are really excited about now, which is ... things that make async easy.

The claim is something like:

Perl 6 has the things that people are really excited about now, including things that make async easy.

Perl 6 includes sweet concurrency, parallel, and async constructs.

I think you've read poor material or misinterpreted it.

I think that this would have been an amazing release when Ruby was getting popular, but I think it's a few years too late.

Fair enough. Time will tell.

stesch2• 11 years ago

Some of the operators use non ASCII characters. Here is how you enter them: http://doc.perl6.org/language/unicode_entry

No risk, no fun.

hahainternet2• 11 years ago

There are ASCII equivs for most, they're called 'Texas' operators.

stesch2• 11 years ago

Larry Wall is a linguist. I'm sure there has to be some reasoning behind making the language more complex. Do you know of a text by him explaining why there are two kind of writing the same operators? And why using non ASCII characters?

bshimmin• 11 years ago

I have a lot of fond memories of Perl from a decade or so ago, and would love to do something more than just installing and tinkering with Perl 6 and then forgetting all about it. I also conveniently have a little "weekend project" coming up where I can probably just choose whatever language seems most fun (and then rewrite it in something sensible later if it grows beyond "weekend" status).

If I chose Perl 6, what's a nice Sinatra-esque thing, and is there an ORM? And how do I deploy it and run it in production (copy it into cgi-bin?!)?

frik• 11 years ago

It's impressive how different the languages Perl (5 -> 6), PHP (5 -> 7; no 6) and Python (2 -> 3) developed in the last 10 years. And how their community reacted and their transition to newer releases.

bad_user2• 11 years ago

The thing that excited me about Perl6 was Parrot (http://parrot.org), which is supposed to be this very ambitious VM targeting dynamic languages.

But unfortunately it seems that Perl6 is Rakudo and they've developed a Rakudo specific VM. Maybe that's best for Perl6 the language, but it also makes it less interesting for me.

hahainternet2• 11 years ago

Perl6 is actually ROAST, but Rakudo is the first compiler that approaches implementing it. Parrot was unfortunately discontinued but Rakudo will not be the only compiler (hopefully!)

xaduha4• 11 years ago

Rakudo will not be the only compiler (hopefully!)

You're correcting people, but sort of wrong yourself.

Rakudo is written in NQP and Perl 6 AFAIK, but NQP can be implemented for different VMs. A while back it worked on Parrot, MoarVM and JVM. I'd say keep Rakudo, but add more backends such as CLR/.NET, WebAssembly/LLVM.

xaduha4• 11 years ago

It's not a Rakudo specific VM, it's NQP specific VM, as I understand it. Rakudo is written using NQP and Perl 6. You can implement other languages using NQP same way as Rakudo is done.

https://github.com/perl6/nqp/tree/master/examples/rubyish

bad_user2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I haven't been up to date with the development of Perl6.

rubyfan2• 11 years ago

Anyone have an idea of how perl6 performs? All the performance articles I've read are really old.

raiph4• 11 years ago

It has some native typed features that mean one can speed up numeric or raw byte/bit operations to be faster, sometimes a lot faster than, say, Perl 5, but it's generally a whole lot slower, 10x and even 100x slower wasn't uncommon a few months ago. Some users claim it's worth trying it to see how it works out for the sort of code a given user writes.

This release is about nailing down the language with a compiler that passes a test suite. Next comes a focus on improving what they have -- nailing bugs, speeding it up and expanding the test suite while making sure it continues to pass the test suite and keeps users' code running.

I'd expect some benchmarks to be published on #perl6 in the next few weeks.

rubyfan2• 11 years ago

Interesting, does poor performance hold true using JVM? I'd expect MoarVM to have some performance issues since its new.

Is the multi-vm approach anything more than a novelty or is this expected to be a feature, i.e. a common spec and intermediate layer with support for different backend VMs?

rsiqueira• 11 years ago

Perl6 example:

sub Σ(@array_to_sum) { return [+] @array_to_sum; }

say Σ (1,2,3,4); # It will display 10

nedludd• 11 years ago

As if to confirm Perl's descent into obscurity they give the release a name that 95% of the people of the world can't read.

The cherry on top of the public relations disaster that the introduction of Perl6 has been...

Perl 6 Released

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