Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/pull/89

by Ovid • 7 years ago

619 438 7 years ago

Ovid4• 7 years ago

This has been a huge deal for the Perl community.

First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5.

But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor.

Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" for Perl 6 was created, but that didn't seem to help.

Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way.

If I had my choice, I'd program in raku because it's a lovely language addressing many pain points (including being one of the few dynamic languages with a working concurrency model). But it's not adopted widely enough yet for that to happen. Time will tell ...

lliamander6• 7 years ago

including being one of the few dynamic languages with a working concurrency model...

Elixir is worth a look. It's a pretty productive little language with a great concurrency model.

tombert3• 7 years ago

For that matter, Erlang has been around for like almost 30 years and has had multicore support since 2007, and has always been dynamic.

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

When someone says they want to work in Perl6/Raku, they likely have vastly different problems than someone using Erlang/Elixer. There is overlap of course (both general purpose), but I can't imagine using Erlang for scripting, while Raku is first class here.

dimitar• 7 years ago

Clojure has a focus on concurrency, is functional and it embraces JS and Java, the dominant platforms.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way.

I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.

sigzero• 7 years ago

They'll probably skip to 7.

joshlemer• 7 years ago

It's not uncommon to leap frog versions in such cases. PHP went from 5 to 7, for instance.

ttkciar3• 7 years ago

Since the language-previously-known-as-Perl6 will be known as Raku, there shouldn't be any conflict with Perl v6

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

I can say that at least currently, there is no appetite for Perl attempting to "reclaim" the Perl 6 version in the foreseeable future. It would be a disaster in both community relations and marketing. It will either be Perl 7 or Perl 34+.

cjohansson• 7 years ago

Maybe it’s better to find a new name for the next Perl 5 language version. It would simplify internet searches. It should be clearly distinct from Raku though.. Angular is in a similar mess to Perl, very hard to find decent information on web crawlers

StevePerkins• 7 years ago

Perl 5 was released in 1994. At this point, the "5" isn't really a version number anymore. It's just part of the name.

If you did a "major version bump" from here, you'd probably have to bring the "5" along for the ride. Like Java version 2, where you had J2EE version <X> for years.

In reality, there probably never will be another major version bump of Perl 5, in the marketing sense. The minor version number is really the major version number now.

jandrese2• 7 years ago

That would be an issue, but I don't think there is an appetite for a new major version of Perl at this point.

To avoid confusion they would probably break the version convention entirely and name it with the year instead. So instead of Perl6 it would be Perl'19.

yesbabyyes2• 7 years ago

I think it's likely they will skip the 5, and continue with version 32, or whatever minor they're up to now.

wvenable• 7 years ago

A similar sort of situation happened with PHP which is why there is no PHP 6 -- it jumped straight from PHP 5 to 7.

mhd2• 7 years ago

Ditch the major version. As the current one is 5.30, the next one will be Perl 31, the next stable is Perl 32.

FillardMillmore• 7 years ago

Well, PHP jumped from 5 to 7 (without there truly ever being a 6) so I think Perl could do the same with no major downside.

msla2• 7 years ago

And this might save Raku.

Lisp has a social problem: It's been called Lisp too long. People look at some simplified LISP 1.5-esque thing in a programming languages textbook and see a "pure" language (which isn't so pure compared to Haskell, but the creep of what "functional programming" means is its own post) which is completely useless. They don't see modern Common Lisp with its package management facility and its packages which you can manage which provide actual functionality and its FFI bindings to external libraries and the fact it compiles to optimized machine code... no, they only see some parentheses thing which is interpreted-and-therefore-slow (you know... like Javascript on V8... ) and is too elegantly pure to be bound to the outside world. Meanwhile, all the Foogols get new names every couple decades (PL/I to Ada to C to C++ to Java to C#... ) so everyone knows they're completely up to date.

My point is, Perl is a tainted name, because everyone knows Perl is dead and Perl 6 is the Duke Nukem Forever of programming languages. Calling it Raku is a chance to get what the Perl 6 team actually did out into the world without the stench of death following it.

ddaa10• 7 years ago

Foogols get new names every couple decades (PL/I to Ada to C to C++ to Java to C#... )

+1 for Foogol. Reference to commercially obscure language but annoyingly influencial Algol?

Jach• 7 years ago

The social problem of the name is less similar to Lisp than I think you're making it, but I do agree it is probably not a terrible thing in the end and could be considered good. I don't think it's going to be impactful enough to "save" or not save the language (as someone mentioned elsewhere, if you called Betamax by a different name, it's unlikely the ultimate outcome would have changed).

The reason I think it's not related to the Lisp issue is because the relation of Perl 5 and Perl 6 was like an unofficial successor with a compatibility mode, like C and C++, whereas the relations between Lisps that create the social problem you highlight of people not knowing about "Real Lisp" are the relations of very incompatible forks with varied functionality running around calling themselves "Lisps" or "members of the Lisp family" and people confusing that with "Lisp". (There were some "Perl 5/6, C/C++" types of relations in the path to Common Lisp like Flavors/CLOS but no one remembers or cares about those outside of Lisp users...) Another reason is the timing, why the name change now, years later -- it turns out Perl (5) is less dead or possessing a stench of death as you put it than people might want, it's still vigorous in its own rights, and so really it makes most sense to just call the new thing by a new name and not destroy both. (Larry's wineskin comment is nice.) The Python 2/3 situation is a closer analog if we counterfactually imagine Python 3000 came out with the current 3.7 feature set, syntax updates, and backwards incompatibility. Python 2 users (me among them) would still have dragged their feet, since Python 2 would still have been useful, still had its own vigor, the same as presently, but it might have resulted in renaming some later version of Python 3 instead of the current situation of renaming the continuation of Python 2 (Tauthon).

Going back to the lisp issue to further elaborate why I think it's not very related to this one, the languages that called themselves Lisp (not a Lisp, but Lisp or Some Lisp) shared a heritage going back to the original McCarthy Lisp. The merely "a lisp" languages used that for marketing, but were actually called something different (Clojure, Scheme, even Racket which has to further distinguish itself from Scheme). You see the heritage in the actual Lisp 1.5 manual, where one of the earliest examples should quickly dispel any illusions today about "Lisp's" supposed purity when they show the function 'length implemented with a program block and goto. By only modifying the top-level function define format and substituting ADD1 with 1+, the program works to this day in Common Lisp. For members of the lisp family that don't call themselves lisp, you're not going to be able to make such a trivial transformation, because there's no shared code heritage, just a vaguely shared s-exp-ness to the syntax. And right after that the manual describes the "pseudo-function" 'trace, which to this day is lacking in supposedly modern languages or requires a bunch of IDE ceremony to set up. It's present in CL and behaves the same, though. Continuing to call CL as simply Lisp seems pretty well-deserved.

The Lisp social problem then is that people run into members of the vaguely defined lisp family like Scheme (especially with SICP formerly being a common gateway for freshmen or HS students) or Clojure and confuse "a lisp" with "Lisp". They can spread their confusion further by releasing a project/blog like "let's write a lisp interpreter!" that can be understood correctly as "let's make a program that interprets code for a lisp¹" but tends to be misunderstood (sometimes even by the author) as "let's make a program that interprets code for Lisp".

Of course I also think this "social problem" is way overstated, especially these days when it's so trivial to dispel the old myths and when the gateways via Clojure or Racket are actually good in their own right and so don't leave the same impressions of "Lisp's a neat toy" that only seeing SICP Scheme could. But if people keep talking about the problem as if it is big, perhaps it will become self-fulfilling, hence my long comment in disagreement. ;)

¹ aka a member of the lisp family based on my vague membership criteria that probably don't even pass Steele's 3-part acceptance test in https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf that requires as its final step (atanh -2) to return a complex number. (Bonus if the correct complex number.)

cgh• 7 years ago

Calling it Raku is a chance to get what the Perl 6 team actually did out into the world without the stench of death following it.

"Raku" = "cancer" in Polish. Not a lot of Polish enthusiasm forthcoming, I'd imagine.

bborud2• 7 years ago

This has been a huge deal for the Perl community.

I wasn't aware that there was one beyond the poor sods charged with maintaining my youthful sins.

Ovid4• 7 years ago

I get hired all the time to fix legacy systems in Perl or to build new systems in Perl.

We're still out there, but it's not "cool" to talk about.

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

Hey Ovid. I'm curious...if P6 had been performant and production worthy enough for your tau-station game, how much easier would the project be than with P5 + Moose? Just curious...I remember you saying years ago that you would've used it if you could've at the time.

Ovid4• 7 years ago

The https://taustation.space/ game runs great on Perl 5, but yes, with a robust Perl 6, many things would have been easier to implement. But by "robust" I don't mean just the language—I also mean the ecosystem.

There is no DBIx::Class (or related schema loader) for Perl 6. I don't know how mature the web frameworks are. Or even basic stuff like Excel reader/writers (we use lots of Excel for backend data analysis).

On the other hand, most of the async stuff we currently use can be thrown out. With raku's gradual typing, our in-house type libraries can be tossed out. Our local modules for making it easier to write clean procedural and OO code could be thrown out.

And the raku code would be far more concise and easy to read. Here's a simple Point object in Moose:

    package Point {
        use Moose;
        use overload '""' => \&Str, fallback => 1;
        use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;
        subtype "PointLimit" => as 'Num'
            => where   { $_ >= -10 && $_ <= 10 }
            => message { "$_ must be a Num between -10 and 10, inclusive" };

        has [qw/x y/] => (
            is       => 'rw',
            isa      => 'PointLimit',
            required => 1,
        );

        sub Str {
            my $self = shift;
            return sprintf "[%f,%f]" => $self->x, $self->y;
        }
    }

raku:

    class Point {
        subset PointLimit of Rat where -10.0 .. 10.0;
        has PointLimit $.x is rw is required;
        has PointLimit $.y is rw is required;
    }

And for those who don't "grok" the above, here it is in Python 3, just so you can see how clean raku's OO syntax is:

    class PointLimit:
        def __init__(self, name):
            self.name =  name
        def __get__(self, point, owner):
            return point.__dict__.get(self.name)
        def __set__(self, point, value):
            if not -10 < value < 10:
                raise ValueError('Value %d is out of range' % value)
            point.__dict__[self.name] = value

    class Point:
        x = PointLimit('x');
        y = PointLimit('y');

        def __init__(self, x, y):
            self.x = x
            self.y = y

        def __str__(self):
            return "[%f,%f]" % (self.x, self.y)

Causality1• 7 years ago

Rather reminds me of what happened with Palm OS 5 and Palm OS 6. Both ended up adopting separate names but because OS 6 wasn't backwards compatible the sheer weight of legacy software kept it from ever catching on.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

If only the Python community could learn something here

overcast2• 7 years ago

Can someone give the rest of us some context on this?

bifrost6• 7 years ago

Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious.

Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5.

FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

peterangular4• 7 years ago

In the same boat on the "why haven't people moved on"... Perl use to be ubiquitous but over time it's really gone to the wayside vs. Python tooling for more complex stuff, and back to basic BASH for the simple scripting needs.

Every time Perl comes up in a professional environment for me I'm reluctant to say I'm capable, because it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company. (obviously this is VERY anecdotal to my career)

I dropped Perl from my resume about a decade ago because I just frankly don't want to work with it. The language is terse, and I don't think anyone who's starting off these days would be spending their time well by learning it. Make your own opinions, but mine is/has always been "ewww."

lilSebastian14• 7 years ago

FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all

Great language, large library on cpan, great eco system, people enjoy using it, they have a large code base that's run fine for decades. Choose 1 or more.

I moved on in 2011

You're right, it's all about you and what you do...

notyourday5• 7 years ago

FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.

Because it works. Scripts/software that works does not experience bit rot. As long as it works, people will continue to use it.

Edit: OK, fine. It seems the downvoters are convinced that the code does in fact experience bit rot, and spoils with time. Probably like fish.

rafaelvasco• 7 years ago

In several instances it's a matter of comfort zone, one of the biggest enemies of positive progress;

yellowapple3• 7 years ago

I'm all about using the right tool for the job. Sometimes Perl is that tool, and thus sometimes I'll still use Perl.

pvaldes7• 7 years ago

I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all

It does the job

ether_at_cpan5• 7 years ago

I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all

Because there's a huge amount of applications and websites still built in it, and it's still a great language so new projects are written in it all the time.

source: my very prosperous career, which has been almost entirely in Perl for the last 15 years

lilSebastian14• 7 years ago

Not complete but enough to get the context

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-ren...

ram_rar• 7 years ago

Can someone explain to me, for what kinda of new projects would they use Perl/Raku in 2019 at all?

gillesjacobs2• 7 years ago

A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic language technology research.

julienfr1122• 7 years ago

Spacy, the new kid on the block, is in python...

make3• 7 years ago

.. in the old guard of language technology research I guess, because in my NLP lab, no one knows the first thing about Perl (everything is done in Python)

Tepix• 7 years ago

Something that can take advantage of the new and improved regular expressions

riffraff• 7 years ago

I like raku's grammars, and I appreciate the idea of having them as first class, in a way other languages don't have them.

But you have parser libraries that work very well in all major languages, and I'm not sure being integrated in the language makes Raju more valid for any project.

What it does, imo, is offer a special way to solve some stuff by already being there. But it's like saying someone would choose python for a project because it has a built-in set data type.

liveoneggs• 7 years ago

a project that wants to use an interesting language with a lot of depth, cool features, great c interfacing, and easy concurrency?

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

Yes, and also one where performance isn't a huge requirement (it's improving).

joombaga• 7 years ago

Perl is ubiquitous. I think it's required for POSIX compatibility but I'm having trouble locating a source for that.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 7 years ago

Guestbook cgis

proverbialbunny4• 7 years ago

Raku excels at slicing and dicing input data. So, if you need to read from a database or a csv or anything similar, Raku is amazing at taking that data and converting it into the format to do processing on.

Not only that, but when Perl 5 was at the end of its life, comparing its libraries to both Python and Ruby, you'd often find the best library was for Perl.

Raku should be far faster than Python and Ruby and may in the future have better libraries with excellent concurrency support, making it a good choice to do processing over the data, not just converting it to the format you need. It has an easy interface with C and C++, so you can import libraries from there too, if you need more speed.

Before Python came to fame Perl was primarily used by two groups: 1) sys admins who needed bash style 1 liners, but in a cleaner language (This is where the dirty code stereotype comes from.) and 2) Web devs. Much of the early pre PHP internet and even post PHP internet was written in Perl. When Perl on hiatus the web world turned into this mess of frameworks like it is today. It used to be a more unified world.

And then there is the rare 3rd group. I worked on earlier ML projects in Perl before Python was a thing. I enjoyed Perl more than Python and so did the people around me. Moving to Python / R was somewhat painful knowing it could have been better. I hope Raku takes up this torch and is good as it appears to be.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

Perl 5 has never been at the end of its life (though it was intended to be 15 years ago, things changed), this is one part of what this rename is meant to clarify. It still has a major release each year and modules are released to CPAN constantly: https://metacpan.org/recent

pugworthy• 7 years ago

Years ago I worked with Rogue Wave Software, which sold C++ libraries. There was a customer who wanted to sort a huge dataset, and RW's sort code took something like 15 minutes to sort. Perl took 15 seconds. I don't know if it was ever figured out why, but it was (is) just one of those signs of how Perl still can be amazing at some things.

Still have my O'Reilly 1st Annual Perl Conference bag around. Good times.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

A particularly poor algorithm choice for sorting can be catastrophic.

sacomo• 7 years ago

we are using it internally for a lot of management apps. we just deployed a new authorization frontend for graphite / carbon using cro that is handling several million daily requests (per small EC2 instance).

raku is a great language to work with for us. it is feature rich, has good abstractions, and developer friendly. if you like the syntax then give it a try.

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

Fifteen years too late. But I suppose better late than never.

rubinelli• 7 years ago

Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

I don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete until recently.

DonHopkins6• 7 years ago

Yeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.

AlexCoventry2• 7 years ago

Perl was built on a shaky foundation from the start. It was inevitable that it would collapse under its own weight.

guelo• 7 years ago

If raku failed to catch on whilst it was named Perl it has even less chance to catch on now.

opens3• 7 years ago

Hallelujah! Great decision :) it will give Raju a chance to be viewed without the "line noise" lens of Perl 5.

DonHopkins6• 7 years ago

I'm disappointed they didn't take my suggestion to rename Perl 6 to "$#_@;\>&%}`[*~!^)".

chipotle_coyote• 7 years ago

I'm disappointed that's not executable. :)

thetwentyone• 7 years ago

Julia has a really great threading model coming in v1.3, which is likely to be released this month: https://julialang.org/blog/2019/07/multithreading

It already supports a variety of parallel techniques but it's about to get easier and safer (e.g. safe I/O).

SQueeeeeL• 7 years ago

Is Julia getting more stable? I remember that was the big issue a few years ago, especially since it calls so many weird CUDA apis.

vanderZwan• 7 years ago

Well, that's what reaching 1.0 was supposed to represent, but I don't (get to) use it (for the kind of work I do) so I cannot say for sure if that actually worked out in practice.

chrispeel• 7 years ago

Julia itself is stable. Julia allows writing libraries (packages) that are as performant as built-in libraries; in some cases it's hard to remember that these external packages are ... external and sometimes not as stable as the core language and standard libraries.

ChrisRackauckas2• 7 years ago

There is no CUDA API in the standard language. The tools for automatically generating CUDA code from Julia code is the CUDAnative.jl package, which at this point is pretty stable and has fairly widespread use.

vinceguidry4• 7 years ago

This should have happened with Python 2/3.

eranima• 7 years ago

Perl 6 is WAY more different than Perl 5. Python 3 absolutely should not have been renamed.

vinceguidry4• 7 years ago

Well right now I avoid using any tool written in python that doesn't have os-level packages because there still isn't a clean way to use python repos without deep understanding of how python works.

cestith4• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with you but I can't imagine why you're getting downvoted. It's definitely an argument worth making.

vinceguidry4• 7 years ago

Nobody likes hearing their favorite language trashed.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

The Python situation had a major difference: the current maintainers of Python 2 and Python 3 are the same, and Python 2 is still intended to be EOLd. A clean break would surely have avoided many problems but it's hard to speculate how it would have gone.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

What utility does Perl provide in a world dominated by python?

ncmncm2• 7 years ago

Legit question.

Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is also the only one that can use Postgres for storage.

I could not find any blog engine in Python.

matthewowen• 7 years ago

https://wagtail.io/

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

There are static site generators written in Python you could use to publish a blog, like Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/) and Lektor (https://www.getlektor.com/). But yeah, if you want software that works like WordPress and generates pages dynamically on the fly, I'm not sure there's any good Python-based alternatives.

If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse

In fairness to PHP, it's a lot better today than it used to be. (Though modern PHP would probably strike a Pythonista as too Java-ish.) And WordPress has had tons of engineering resources poured into it for a decade-plus now, whereas Movable Type has been maintained on a relative shoestring due to its fall from popularity.

wumpus2• 7 years ago

One thing perl provides is a few examples of how to handle utf-8 better than Python does.

To put this another way, my 10-year-old perl-based web crawler did not have a problem crawling websites with umlauts in the hostname. Python is fixing supporting that new 2008 standard next year.

eddyg2• 7 years ago

Plenty.

Read https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html or the follow-up https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html

Or, Why Perl 6 is the "Game of Thrones" of programming languages: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thron...

Lots more where those came from...

ttkciar3• 7 years ago

Its runtime is quite a bit faster and enjoys a smaller memory footprint. It is also more amenable to "bash on steroids" scripting, and has a quarter-million canned solutions in CPAN.

PyPi has caught up with CPAN in terms of sheer number of packages, but there are still a lot of differences in what those packages cover. You might find solutions in CPAN without a counterpart in PyPi.

More narrowly, every time I deal with databases in python, I find myself missing perl's DBI, which provides the same API for all databases with a corresponding DBD. Python should get a similar universal database interface someday.

mhd2• 7 years ago

The inverse could've been asked about Python ages ago.

emptybits• 7 years ago

I love Python and I don't see the subset of the world dominated by Python changing to Raku any time soon. But there are some things that made me smile and nod and want to read more about the language. Two, off the top of my head.

1. Raku treats math in a manner that wouldn't surprise a mathematician. Or grade school student, for that matter. Witness:

    $ python3 -c 'print(0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2)'
    False
    $ ruby -e 'puts 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2'
    false
    $ perl6 -e 'say 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2'
    True

(Raku prefers rational to floating point math when possible, but of course you can force floating point if you prefer that behaviour.)

2. Concurrency is a language goal in Raku and I think that's notable, compared to Python. Parallelism, concurrency, and asynchrony including multi-core support.[1]

[1] https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

As a Perl programmer, this is basically a post I might have written (aside from knowing it's not dominant anymore :) One more really cool aspect is the first class Unicode support, which Perl can do but you have to work at it.

pvaldes7• 7 years ago

Maybe creativity. Perl world has always been proud to be able to solve the same thing in twenty different, often arcane, ways. Sometimes this is a good trait, other not so.

And Perl programs do not spontaneously decompose when copypasted also.

And CPAN is still a very profitable gold mine to explore.

edflsafoiewq• 7 years ago

From what I could tell, Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music").

Incidentally, it also happens to sound similar to "roku" (="six").

amptorn• 7 years ago

It's a pretty good name I think!

rcthompson• 7 years ago

This is exactly the type of linguistic naming shenanigans I'd expect from the Perl community.

tvaughan• 7 years ago

And back when we had to read books to learn a language, the definitive guide on Perl was called "the camel book." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Perl

aflag2• 7 years ago

I'm curious, how do you learn languages now?

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

It is also a type of Japanese pottery. "Raku pottery is "imperfect but sophisticated", so that's a fit :)" https://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/perl6?date=2018-...

cestith4• 7 years ago

That description also fits a camel.

pvaldes7• 7 years ago

Raku appears to be from Rakudo, the Perl 6 compiler, which is a shortened form of rakuda-dou (="way of the camel" in Japanese). Rakudo also means "paradise". The "raku" from "way of the camel" means "camel", while the "raku" from "paradise" means "fun" or "enjoyable" (or "music").

One of the worst problems for adoption of perl6 has been always overthinking. "Hey, look at my cool name" has never convinced anybody to use a computer language. Too many names.

Raku is a good name indeed. Like a promise of prune and simplify all the former zoo of names that could finally allow the people to focuse in the program

coldtea5• 7 years ago

One of the worst problems for adoption of perl6 has been always overthinking. "Hey, look at my cool name" has never convinced anybody to use a computer language. Too many names.

You're overthinking it. I don't think those who came up with the names did so to, or cared to, convince people to use the language with them...

Sharlin• 7 years ago

There was something strangely familiar about the word "raku" but it took me a moment to make the connection. In Finnish, "raakku" is a common name for the mollusc species Margaritifera margaritifera, better known as the… freshwater pearl mussel! [1] I'm really not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or yet another layer of linguistic brilliance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_pearl_mussel

GolDDranks• 7 years ago

Oh wow, I didn't know that, but I know that there is/was a band called "Raakku ja helmet". I always thought "Raakku" was a humorous nickname of the singer, because "raakkua" means "to cry like a crow", i.e. not so well. But "raakku" meaning "a mussel" brings a whole new level of meaning: "Mussel and the Pearls".

earenndil• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, in hebrew, it means spoiled or decayed. :)

cben• 7 years ago

That would be Rakuv רקוב, just Raku doesn't have any meaning in Hebrew. It does sound similar when pronounced though.

(Hebrew word formation is from 3-consonant roots, not concatenation, so removing a letter doesn't give a related word. It's either an invalid word or a different root with 3rd voiceless consonant רקוא which is a not a root / רקוע Raku'a "flattened" but that doesn't sounds quite differently.)

wodenokoto• 7 years ago

Raku means happy, fun or relaxed: https://jisho.org/word/楽

Rakudo means paradise: https://jisho.org/word/楽土

Rakuda is a camel: https://jisho.org/word/駱駝

zumu2• 7 years ago

So as a Japanese speaker, I don't think I ever would have made the 'raku' == 'rakuda' camel connection.

Also, while 'raku' is the reading for 楽, which connotes easy, simple and other good things, it is also the reading for a bunch of other characters--namely, 落, which means or carries the connotation of falling, declining or otherwise missing the mark.

When I see the 'raku' transliteration in the context of Perl, I think of 落. Not sure if that says something about my subconscious perception of Perl or not, but I can't help but think 'Raku' is a bad choice for the name of a language mired in indecision and falling from public favor.

On another note, I find the inclination of tech projects towards poorly translated Japanese words amusing. It nicely compliments the phenomena you see in the use of random English words for the naming of Japanese cars, condo buildings, and other 'prestigious' products. So if you find that ridiculous, you should find these 'Japanese' technology names ridiculous as well.

Ultimatt2• 7 years ago

Raku isnt falling from public favor, it hasn't made it yet. It's an entirely different language to Perl 5. Like the difference between C and C# or Java.

andreygrehov• 7 years ago

If anyone is interested in working with the language, AFAIK, DuckDuckGo's backend is primarily written in Perl.

ricardobeat• 7 years ago

Perl 6 / Raku introduces so many new constructs that is almost an entirely new language.

rollschild2• 7 years ago

I really wish the Perl 6 -> Raku change could let it catch up with other languages such as Python.

Edit: sorry for the confusion. I meant popularity-wise. I wish the change would clarify to people that Perl 6 and Perl 5 are basically two different languages and people should at least consider Perl 6 as an option when they start a new project.

meesles• 7 years ago

I don't understand this comment. What needs to 'catch up'? They are vastly different languages with different philosophies, there's problems better solved in either language.

rollschild2• 7 years ago

I meant popularity wise.

resonantjacket5• 7 years ago

Assuming you mean rename the next version of a programming language — I think that’s a horrible idea. The entire point of continuing with the previous name is that eventually the community will move onto the new language. I’m guessing Perl 6 made too many incompatible changes from Perl 5 though I don’t know much about them.

daotoad• 7 years ago

Perl 6 started out as a plan for the next version of Perl.

Over the years (announced in 2000, delivered in 2015) it evolved into a distinct language.

In the meantime, Perl5 suffered from the Osbourne Effect.

Meanwhile a rift developed in the Perl community. Some are for Perl 5 forever. Some are Perl 6 forever. Some Perl 5 people blame Perl 6 for Perl 5's perception as a dead language. Some Perl 6 people blame Perl 5's reputation for being "write only" and "dead" for difficulty getting people to try Perl 6.

IMHO, both sides are correct, both sides over-state their case.

Renaming Perl 6 has been discussed for close to a decade, by people who are Perl 5, Perl 6, and just plain Perl partisans.

It's been a difficult decision. Many people have worked very hard on both projects, and have strong feelings tied up in the issue. Important contributors to the projects have quit as a result the issues.

This isn't a change that was lightly made. It's far bigger than the Python 2 to Python 3 divergence. It's more like moving from C to C#.

eddyg2• 7 years ago

What do you mean? Perl6/Raku has some great features that make it much better than Python. In addition to no GIL, there's other advantages, like discussed here: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thron... and https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html

The features demonstrated in this talk are worth a watch (or at least a scroll through the slide deck): http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/

Upvoter33• 7 years ago

I'm amazed that Perl is still around. I personally find it the least readable language that I've ever used, and that includes a lot of languages. But some people really seem to love it, for reasons a bit beyond me.

theonemind• 7 years ago

I find programming perl fun inversely to program size and proportionally to the need to slice and dice text. I didn't learn perl until the perl 5 era, but from what I can tell, I would've been as satisfied with perl 4, before they bolted on OO and tried to expand the applicable problem domain of the language. I mostly just use it as a super-charged awk and bash replacement for scripting.

tyingq3• 7 years ago

The bolted on OO is really just one new function...bless(). The rest is package namespaces, which are also used for non OO purposes.

I'm never sure what people don't like about OO Perl. There's a tiny bit of boilerplate in a constructor, other than that, it doesn't seem different from other OO script languages.

Shoop• 7 years ago

Even if you never want to write any Perl code, I definitely recommend checking out some of the features of Raku. As someone who is interested in language design but never has (or likely will) use Perl for a project, I still found reading about Raku's feature set super interesting. Here's a whimsical slide deck that introduces a lot of the most interesting features: [0]. Even if you find yourself shaking your head at all the craziness, you at least have to admire Raku's success at fulfilling its goals of being a post-modern language optimized for fun (-Ofun).

[0] http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/

pmoriarty• 7 years ago

How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it?

Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really didn't know it very well, if at all.

Some of them might have glanced at some Perl code and saw a dense regex and dismissed it as "line noise". Well, yeah, if you don't know regexes you would be forgiven for thinking it was line noise, but if you did know regexes it should look no more like line noise than a similarly dense regex in any other language.

For a long time now, Perl has allowed regexes to be commented. Commenting dense regexes and splitting them up in to short regexes assigned to judiciously named variables is just good style in any language, and has been the norm in Perl for a long time. Furthermore, modern Perl style guidelines advise code to be written with verbose, English words instead of ancient Perl one-character special variable names.

So setting aside both dense, uncommented regexes and ancient single-letter special variable names, both of which have been recognized as poor style in Perl for decades now, I'm really not sure what the complaints about Perl readability are about. To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways.

If you include non-mainstream languages, some languages which have a lot of fans here on HN are arguably a lot less readable than Perl to someone only familiar with traditional Algol-style languages. In particular, I'm thinking of Forth and Haskell. Yet you rarely hear complaints on here about their readability.

lilSebastian14• 7 years ago

Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really didn't know it very well, if at all.

Indeed, I hope this thread gets picked up by http://n-gate.com/

j9461701• 7 years ago

How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it?

It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every work day for the past 6 months.

To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways.

It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things that compound on top of each other. Until you get something like this:

while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

Mostly though it's how it's used. It can technically do anything, so a lot of the times it is asked to do everything. Until one day you wake up to find you have hundreds of perl files, all tens of thousands of lines long, that all interconnect in an insane Object Oriented hierarchy soup stretching across every conceivable programming space - from database control to money processing to security to web site design.

commandersaki• 7 years ago

'x' is an operator...

eruci2• 7 years ago

Just because you can't read it, is not a good reason to hate it. But, as Larry says, "It is better to be hated by those who don't know you, than by those who do"

WheelsAtLarge• 7 years ago

True, it's very easy to make your code unreadable but other languages have the same drawback too. I would never pick it as the language for team projects. But with Perl you can really pack a lot of power into each line of code. It's hard to beat for scripting.

cutler7• 7 years ago

I love Perl - the syntax, community, Larry Wall's writings and The Monastery. Occupationally I'm forced to write Ruby for a living these days but Perl's influence is there and enhances my appreciation or Ruby. I came into programming after reading in the Dreaweaver Bible that you could extend the search facility with regular expressions. Jeffrey Friedl's monumental Mastering Regular Expressions was listed for further reference and I was hooked. Perl was the natural language to learn if you were inspired by regexen and wanted to create dynamic websites back in the early 2000s so I sought-out Larry Wall's Programming Perl. That book is such a joy to read. I still dip into it today just for the quality of the writing ... and a little nostalgia.

Take time to really grok Perl and you may find the soundbite swipes at Perl don't make sense any longer.

takeda2• 7 years ago

Perl gets a lot of flak, I am no fan of it, but frankly the least readable language IMO is bash.

h1d• 7 years ago

Seems you've never used shell scripting.

GuB-42• 7 years ago

I also find it one of the least readable language. Or more precisely, the language that requires the most effort to be made readable. Every language can be made unreadable.

But it is also one of the most writable language. In Perl, for most problems, there is a quick and dirty way of addressing it. It is especially true when it comes to processing text files, the thing that Perl is best known for.

Many languages try to be clean and consistent, it is obviously good for readability, but it means that choices have to be made. Sometimes the best way is the "wrong" way and you have to fight against the language. Perl solved that problem by not having a "wrong" way of doing things, screw cleanliness and consistency.

Also, first class regex are awesome for quick and dirty text processing.

natch• 7 years ago

This is great news both for Perl and for Raku. I will probably bother to take a serious look at Raku now, sometime, if anything just for curiosity. Why not before? I have no good answer for that.

But my main worry about it is that I suspect it has brought along with it the community's dysfunctional fascination with over-the-top cleverness and arcane constructs. I'll probably stick with Python and Perl 5 on an as-needed basis, but Raku will be fun to look in on for brain stimulation.

My best case hope is maybe it's clarified some things! Like having an agreed on best practice for how objects are implemented, that would be nice.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

Perl has pretty much coalesced on Moo(se) for this, though it's not core yet. And yes, Raku has a thorough core object system.

petre7• 7 years ago

Why not before? Because Perl is you know, dead. Jokes aside, it's a pretty nice language apart from the !$double .@sigils. If I'd switch from Perl 5, I'd probably switch to Ruby, as Perl 6 oops Raku is quite slow.

xisukar3• 7 years ago

... apart from the !$double .@sigils

In this case, `!$double` isn't a sigil. `!` is just the old prefix operator for negating a value [1]. If you meant to write `$!double`, then it's the twigil [2] for class attributes [3]. Twigils could be considered as secondary sigils but they affect the scoping of a variable. In this instance, `!` is for class attributes and will only be found there.

As for `.@sigils`, I've never seen this syntax. I'm probably out of the loop in this one.

As an aside, sigils are one of Raku's interesting features. They convey information [4] that might not be easy to discern from just looking at the code. What kind of structure is this variable holding? Is it holding an array? A hash? A code object? What's the scope of this variable? Is it class-scoped? Is it dynamically-scoped? Is it a compile-time variable?

... Raku is quite slow.

This is a legitimate reason for avoiding the language. However, it's worth pointing out that Raku core developers have made great improvements to the language in the speed department since it was first officially released in 2015. They recognize there's a lot of room for improvement. [5]

[1] https://docs.perl6.org/routine/!

[2] https://docs.perl6.org/language/variables#index-entry-Twigil

[3] https://docs.perl6.org/language/variables#index-entry-$!

[4] https://docs.perl6.org/language/faq#Why_sigils?_Couldn't_you...?

[5] https://docs.perl6.org/language/faq#Is_Perl_6_fast_enough_fo...?

SwellJoe2• 7 years ago

Ruby is also quite slow. The last benchmarks I saw makes it pretty clear Raku has closed the gap with Ruby (at least the mainline C implementation of Ruby) on a lot of fronts, and is likely to be faster for many things in another year or two and the VM gets better at optimization. My google fu isn't up to finding those benchmark results now, but it's no secret that Ruby is pretty sluggish compared to Perl 5.

ergothus• 7 years ago

I was a Perl dev a long time ago, and I think it made me a stronger coder. I still miss it, and I've not coded Perl for real in a decade.

You're correct about "over-the-top cleverness and arcane constructs" being a problem, but it's also about using code as communication. We code in _languages_, and on one extreme is coding newpaper style - lowest common linguistic denominator. On a good day this is a common, understandable language, and on a bad day it is trying to communicate with stilted baby talk. On the other extreme is dense linguistic cleverness. On a good day this is nuanced yet clear and informative, on a bad day it is James Joyce.

As coders we like to talk about using the right tool for the job, but in code we so often assume that the most stilted repetative pattern is always best. It often is - like newspapers, we can't (or shouldn't) assume our audience is well-versed in our material. But we have other constraints as well. I often argue in favor of _skimmability_ over _readability_ of code. That means that the attention/focus of the eye is important. Stilted languages with minimal syntax give you almost no control over that. More fluid languages like Perl give you a lot more flexibility. Learning to use that flexibility to increase clarity...for MOST people, not just for yourself...is a skill that most of us have only limited practice at, and none of us have mastered.

But it's a good idea to work at it, and when done well you communicate MORE with LESS, and it's something people notice because it's not buried in the midst of visual noise.

tangental3• 7 years ago

Interesting perspective there. Worth noting that Larry Wall trained as a linguist and "often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale" [0]

On a good day this is nuanced yet clear and informative, on a bad day it is James Joyce.

So true. I think Perl golf could be Samuel Beckett.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

codesections2• 7 years ago

On a good day this is nuanced yet clear and informative, on a bad day it is James Joyce.

If Raku's "bad day" is basically like "one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century" (according to Wikipedia)… well, then, maybe I should check Raku out!

MichaelMoser123• 7 years ago

How much of a difference is it going to make? I mean nowadays most people are going with python, for better or for worse.

tus88• 7 years ago

So will there be a Perl 6 then, or are Perl 5-ists stuck on that major version forever?

spyspy• 7 years ago

Apple and Microsoft have basically proven that you can jump major version numbers and no one will really care.

anonu• 7 years ago

Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late... I learned regex in perl so the language will always have a soft spot in my heart. But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task. There simply is no reason to learn perl unless youre in the unfortunate position of managing some legacy stack.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

But Python has trounced Perl for almost any task.

Well, I think Perl beats Python in quick and concise one-liners written from the command line, doesn't it?

Not that I know much Perl, though.

petre7• 7 years ago

It does but it's still annoying to write on a line as opposed to Ruby or Lua. Writing Python one liners with significant whitespace is out of the question I guess.

xisukar3• 7 years ago

Call me a pessimist, but its too little too late...Python has trounced Perl for almost any task.

Moving forward I'm assuming you're talking about Raku and not about Perl (or Perl 5).

Do you mean little too late to be endorsed by a multi-million company? Or little too late for everything (personal projects, academia, etc.)? I'm trying to clarify this because I've never understood this sailed ship mentality regarding programming languages. And I know you're not saying this but it almost sounds like Raku is supposed to be a replacement for Python. It isn't. They're different languages, both good in some areas and bad in other areas. These areas need not be necessarily overlapping.

Whenever I read this kind of comments, they always remind of the following phrase I came across:

    There are two things that a programming language needs to be acceptable:
        - Be Python
        - Be a language I have used recently

It's almost as if Python marks the pinnacle of programming language research which isn't the case at all. In fact, I daresay no language can since programming languages are a matter of compromises and trade-offs. A language's compromises and trade-offs you're willing to put off with might not be the same for another person. There's an interesting phenomenon I've observed in the Perl community (or at least the Raku for the most part) which seems to be rare in other places: Whenever a situation arises where Raku might not be the best candidate for, community members aren't afraid to consider/suggest/recommend other programming languages as viable options.

harikb• 7 years ago

http://tpm2016.zoffix.com/#/13 - There is so many good ideas to copy to Rustlang!

kbd• 7 years ago

Naming matters. Nim changing from "Nimrod" matters. Cockroachdb's name is offputting. Perl 6's name has caused endless confusion and by itself sabotaged both Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 has interesting ideas but I don't even want to touch it because its naming issue is so toxic. I'm glad they're going to rename it.

anonytrary• 7 years ago

Is there a TLDR on what's wrong with the name "Perl 6" for those of us who have zero context?

takeda2• 7 years ago

I believe the issue was that Perl 6 had too many changes that made it hard to convert apps from earlier version.

That created some kind of limbo where people weren't sure if they should use perl 5 or perl 6 (”why develop in perl 5, when it is probably a dead end and perl 6 is the future” and at the same time "why should I convert to perl 6, what if it will be a failure and I wasted my time?")

By renaming it, it revives Perl 5 so developent can continue, and at the same time Perl 6 is presented as a new language, now whichever wins will be based on its merit.

sundarurfriend• 7 years ago

It was not a version upgrade from Perl5, but instead practically a new language with some similar design principles. So the name was both holding Raku back by associating it with the warts of Perl5, and also holding Perl5 back because people assumed "Perl 6 was the upgraded version so why use the old one". People have been talking for a long long time that the language is different enough to deserve a different name, and things finally seem to have come to a head recently. As a Perl 5 fan and an early ~Perl 6~Raku enthusiast, I'm happy about this change, though it's almost certainly coming too late. Better late than never, I guess.

alexmint• 7 years ago

Perl 6 sounds like a successor of Perl 5 but in reality it is a totally new language. Many long time Perl 5 users think a new name for a new language would have been better.

The name Perl 6 was damaging to the popularity of Perl because beginners were confused whether they should learn Perl 5 or Perl 6. The same confusion existed in Python: Python 2 vs. Python 3 but the Python Wiki was always very clear. Until a certain point, it recommended Python 2 and after Python 3 became very popular, it recommended Python 3. That sort of clarity was missing in Perl. Due to the number of new programmers learning Perl decreased rapidly and finally Python overtook in popularity.

goodcanadian• 7 years ago

The sibling comments aren't wrong. However, Perl 6 was originally intended to be the next version of Perl. For a long time it was vapourware, however, and development restarted on Perl 5.

When Perl 6 finally arrived, it was too much of a step change from Perl 5 to convince many people (myself included). Meanwhile, Perl 5 had continued to develop and was, in no way, in need of a replacement.

pvaldes7• 7 years ago

Agree. To name another example, I personally can't take seriously anything named 'webinar'.

Webinar is similar in spanish to the word huevina that means "egg beaters" (a replacement cheap and second quality). It sounds also like "web-vaina" (a vaina is "something" and specially used when something annoying happens) and has common roots with words like "huevín" (little testicle) and "huevada" (something irrelevant, lacking of any real interest and a total lose of time).

Definitely looks like something created to be dismissed. I can't thing in a worst 'hype' word for replace (without any real need or reason) the perfectly neutral and good old term 'videoconference'. Webinar is the kind of term that Ned Flanders would use.

coldtea5• 7 years ago

Agree. To name another example, I personally can't take seriously anything named 'webinar'

Seeing that webinars have caught on like wildfire, become a multi-billion dollar business, and forced all kinds of eLearning and online platforms to say they offer the ability to produce/share "webinars", I'd say this is rather a counter-example.

I.e. more like "A few might find X or Y name off-putting, some outliers might even come with contrived meanings in unrelated not-exactly homonyms in different languages that supposedly would make a name unsuitable, but in most cases nobody really cares".

philwelch• 7 years ago

“Nimrod” is a funny case. In the Bible, Nimrod is a king and a mighty hunter. In Looney Toons, Elmer Fudd, a decidedly not-mighty hunter, is sarcastically dubbed “Nimrod”, and so the connotation is reversed for those of us who are first exposed to the name as a sarcastic jibe from Bugs Bunny rather than the name of a Biblical figure.

coldtea5• 7 years ago

Naming matters

Not that much.

Nim changing from "Nimrod" matters

Hardly.

Cockroachdb's name is offputting.

Not enough to matter. They still raised over $60 million in funding...

Many people have internalized Marketing/SEO/enterprise-pointy-hair-boss thinking about "what matters", but in the grand scheme of things, naming is not really that relevant...

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

To someone versed in both languages, no. Otherwise, the name giving official credence to assumptions that no longer hold is damaging to both.

droithomme• 7 years ago

The naming is a very good idea since it really is a totally different language and the numbering made it seem like an incremental upgrade. Whether it's too late will remain to be seen. Also, now maybe there is space for an actual Perl 6! :-)

rhabarba• 7 years ago

May Perl 5 live forever. Amen.

scythe• 7 years ago

I kinda wish something like this would happen with LuaJIT, so it can get out of Lua’s shadow.

Lua has breaking changes all the time, which makes sense for its original purpose — embedding — where you don’t need to follow updates. As such the version supported varies among different environments. But LuaJIT has an ecosystem that they try not to break. It’s more of a “conventional” scripting language because of that. It also has an FFI that isn’t in plain Lua.

kizer2• 7 years ago

Is that from the Bible?

kizer2• 7 years ago

I know he’s a man of faith as they say. No judgement of any kind intended.

giancarlostoro3• 7 years ago

Does not sound like anything from the Bible I have ever read. Theres other commentary on this HN post about the many meanings of the name though.

vgetr• 7 years ago

It is - the book of Matthew, specifically.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

I think the comment was asking about the quote in the linked comment, not the name (which was chosen as an alias many months ago).

jdporter• 7 years ago

Of course it's from the Bible -- as a quick google would have told you. It's Mark 2:21-22.

giancarlostoro3• 7 years ago

That's "rhakos" and doesn't explain it well since this comes from "Rakudo", but Rhakos means torn off cloth according to Strong's Greek concordance. I guess it fits though.

eruci2• 7 years ago

A long overdue marketing move.

mikece• 7 years ago

Kudos for making this change! This is what the folks at Microsoft should have done when ASP became ASP.NET and ASP.NET became ASP.NET Core. I know... keeping the root of the name the same makes management think the technology is fundamentally the same (and, therefore, cheaper) but the SEO confusion trying to find the right version of an answer is a PITA.

Secondarily, while Perl has never appealed to me I am more likely to admit I'm checking out Raku because the chances that someone will ask me to look at and debug their cousin's friend's manager's Perl 3 CGI app is considerably reduced.

seirl• 7 years ago

Kudos for making this change!

Rakudos, even!

wodny2• 7 years ago

It will have quite interesting implications, especially for former Perl 5 syntax enthusiasts. One could say in Polish they "code in cancer" ("programuje w raku").

thanatropism• 7 years ago

Not "z raku"?

wodny2• 7 years ago

No. "Z raku" would mean that "raku" accompanies you and the play on words would be gone because it would be either "programuje z raku" ("one is accompanied by raku the programming language") or "programuje z rakiem" ("codes having/with cancer").

bipolar_lisper• 7 years ago

the programming community never ceases to amaze me

davidw3• 7 years ago

It would be cool if Les Claypool played Larry Wall in the movie.

bbanyc2• 7 years ago

I find Perl 5 best for the kinds of fire-and-forget text processing scripts that are a bit too complicated for awk but not involved enough to bring in a "real" language. It's a double-edged sword - in a throwaway script it's awesome to not have to bother converting between the number 12 and the string "12", both numeric and string operators will work on them the same way. In a large project that kind of thing is just going to cause a bunch of untraceable bugs due to unidentified invisible behavior. Or you need to resort to weird hackarounds like "0 but true". Also: $_ is like that, only more so.

CPAN invented the software repository, and I'm glad it was there so PyPI/Gems/NPM/etc. could learn from its mistakes.

Every few years I tried an alpha of Perl 6, but it was always too slow and unstable to get anything real done, and it was always a totally different implementation from the previous one I'd tried. Maybe this name change shows they're getting serious now.

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

I very much prefer "typeless data with typed operators" over Javascript's "typeless data with typeless operators" or basically any language that was forced to add ===.

regularfry• 7 years ago

Didn't CTAN predate CPAN?

bbanyc2• 7 years ago

It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update packages and resolve dependencies, which AFAIK nobody else did at the time. Even Linux package managers didn't get that until a couple years later.

mberning• 7 years ago

I wish them the best of luck, but in my experience rebranding a seriously off track project is often the treatment of last resort. It’s the vancomycin of struggling projects.

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

Will Zoffix return?

7thaccount8• 7 years ago

Not sure how to edit, but for those who don't understand this comment, Zoffix was a key Perl6 contributor who recently left because the community and Larry Wall wouldn't change the name to something else like "Raku" among other things I guess. Now that they have made this change, I'm curious if he'd ever come back and start running the test suites again.

codesections2• 7 years ago

One thing that fascinates me about Raku/Perl6 is how hard it leans into object-oriented programming at a moment when so many other new languages seem to be trending in a distinctly functional direction.

halis• 7 years ago

https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/DaSY-sXB3xqiXQZImbypEvHPdec...

x62Bh7948f• 7 years ago

I used a workflow automation system at my previous gig that used java heavily on the backend. Rakuraku Workflow was the name. I hated it. The name, that in japanese means something like “easy easy” (楽々) didn’t help much. It was a mess.

blondin• 7 years ago

so, raku is shortened for rakudo the perl compiler. rakudo itself might be japanese but i can't confirm.

google, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't want to translate the word because they think i am typing it wrong and they know exactly what i meant to type... but anyways, i think it has to do with paradise or heaven, but i could be wrong.

lacampbell• 7 years ago

Good move. The name 'Perl' has connotations (good or bad depending on who you ask), but this language always seemed like a different kettle of fish.

Names matter.

ksec• 7 years ago

The Author point to [1] for reason for Raku instead of Camelia.

One thing that struck me,

12. Both raku.com and raku.org are currently available.

I was surprised that a 4 letter .com or .org is still available. So I looked it up and turns out to be not true.

And it was interesting half of the discussion had domain name availability as factor.

[1] https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/issues/81#issuecomm...

Grinnz26• 7 years ago

raku.org is no longer available because it is controlled by the Raku project.

gpvos2• 7 years ago

Larry's actual approval (although he has basically said before that the community doesn't need his approval anymore) is here: https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/pull/89#pullrequest...

janeroe2• 7 years ago

In Russian "raku" is a genitive of cancer / a derogatory term used for noob users.

dcompton13• 7 years ago

raku is a type of pottery firing, also from Japan.

Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

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