Comment by Ulti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ulti | Hacker News Reader

OOC how many people would be interested in a Perl 6 Corporate Look n' Feel type site? Where everything is just designed to be boring and on message for production use in a business setting. Front page has Docker deployment and continuous integration setup steps etc. (that all exists and works FYI) Everything would be muted colours and mostly cloning the style of https://www.haskell.org/ or https://nodejs.org/en/ or even as spartan as https://www.rust-lang.org/

I love Perl 6 but I utterly reject and hate the Fisher Price look and feel. It makes it impossible to have a serious conversation at work about Perl 6 or get anyone less than light hearted to care about taking a look at the language. There is so much great stuff there, and basically none of it is for children. I'd go as far to say as Perl 6 would be an awful language for very young children. Something like Scratch has put the effort in there. The idea of Camelia being friendly to kids is a great sentiment... but thats as deep as anyone's effort or considerations have gone for children learning to program in the Perl 6 community. IMHO anyone who feels that's a harsh assessment has probably never attempted to teach programming to young children, I have! It's a near impossible task, and the last thing you touch is syntax or documentation websites. I cant help but feel Camelia and her scheming colours are ham stringing adoption by anyone else looking in from their cubicle or startup loft. Maybe I'm very wrong and everyone loves the bug?

Larry has already blessed such sites if someone steps up and creates it:

> anyway, that's just the .org site; other sites can have dreary corporate logos if they like :)

http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2011-09-15#i_4432065

I'm pretty sure diakopter owns perl6.com; maybe approach him?

Cool I should give it a go then. perl6.io might be the best plan if we're trying to get HN to take notice and try something out >:3

I think there's something to this. Whether it's logical or not, a language is partially judged on its web site. The Ruby and Python sites are less whimsical:

https://www.ruby-lang.org

https://www.python.org

I want the language given a chance based on its merits, not dismissed because of a cartoonish site.

This is also interesting that a language would not be only jugged on it's pretty website shell. I mean, if you got a beautiful language, it is logical to create a beautiful packaging for it... But honestly, I am reluctant to these very shinny corporate websites. Languages developed by communities are not companies products, letting it stay out of the corporate philosophy and game with logos, impressive designs and business oriented wills is a good thing: you try the language, read the doc, write some stuff and if you are convinced, you will surely not take care of this kind of logo, it will even become friendly to you.

I think the R homepage is pretty much perfect:

https://www.r-project.org/

Who wouldn't be excited about learning R after visiting the website!

Sarcasm? While it's not a bad website, I wouldn't say it inspires me to get into stats with R. It doesn't have a code example, or much color. I think the python homepage is much better designed

Slightly, but I love R and make a sizeable part of my living using that language. From a design perspective I much prefer websites like R's, rather than disaster zones like Mashable (although haven't been there for a long time, so maybe it has changed too).

I don't think people interested in R are necessarily going to judge it first by its homepage and website.

I obviously can't speak for everyone but there are no changes to the website that would change the attitude about Perl here at work. Twenty years of unmaintainable Perl code has convinced management that it needs to be eradicated.

Note: I'm not bashing Perl here - developers using any language can create unmaintainable code. The move towards producing enterprise-level software has included increasing salaries to the point where professional software engineers can be hired along with adopting architectural principles that are conducive to producing large-scale software.

I don't think it contributes to the conversation to point out that when inexperienced-by-trade people (managers typically don't code) observe inexperienced-by-laziness people (devs who don't learn how to write maintably in any language), they walk away with impressions that have zero correlation to reality.

Especially when they conflate two completely different languages to boot.

There's nothing to take away here other than "some people are beyond being helped".

The parent's question was whether a more enterprise-like web-site would help with Perl6 adoption - I simply said (for our organization) that the answer was no and included a brief description of why that was the case.

In many cases, Java is still considered THE enterprise language. Other languages have invaded that enterprise dominance by running on the JVM. This includes languages like Scala (which was designed for the JVM) and languages like JPython (which was obviously preceded by Python). So here's another question - Would Perl6 adoption in the enterprise be enhanced by compiling it to bytecode and running it on the JVM?

As an aside, my original note admitted that it was at least partially developer practices that led to the excoriation of Perl - that doesn't change the fact that it is no longer acceptable for application development at my workplace.

> Would Perl6 adoption in the enterprise be enhanced by compiling it to bytecode and running it on the JVM?

I doubt the JVM will be officially supported this year but Rakudo's JVM backend has been running Perl 6 code since 2013.

> it is no longer acceptable for application development at my workplace.

Presumably "it" here refers to Perl 5 and not to other languages like Haskell, Scala or Perl 6?

> Java is still considered THE enterprise language. Other languages have invaded that enterprise dominance by running on the JVM. This includes languages like Scala (which was designed for the JVM) and languages like JPython

I'm always interested to know whether Groovy runs in your JVM workplace, and whether just for scripting, or if you build actual applications with it.

>>Twenty years of unmaintainable Perl code has convinced management that it needs to be eradicated.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. I'd rather build awesome things in Perl 6 better, faster and more productively than in any other language.

Those who don't use it have much to lose than those who do.

Actually perl.org website is very well done, and perldoc.perl.org too looks very to-the-point serious site, without the fisher price look.

If the same template is re used for Perl 6, it would work just wonderfully fine.

I love the bug, but it's because I have a two year old daughter.

I love the bug too really :'( I have a Moomin on my desk, I have the aesthetic sensibility of a two year old. The problem is no one else I work with does. That is a problem, at least for me.

...a few years ago I was in Beijing and was utterly gobsmacked to see, in a ludicrously expensive fashion shop in the heart of the most expensive shopping mall in the city, a shirt with Little My on it.

So apparently we're not the only ones.

Just a idea that drifted into my head:

The background being of a butterfly specimen display, realistic and in faint grey, and one of the butterflies in full colour with the label Perl 6. The other butterflies can even be labelled as other programming languages, like Perl 5 or C or whatever.

Yes, because the website is what's usually hampering adoption of programming languages.

Snark (mostly on point snark, but still) aside, I think you have a point here. It takes one being very shallow to dismiss an entire programming language based on the website being a bit twee.

The only way these kind of knee-jerk reactions get dismantled over time is to ignore the nay-sayers and prove them wrong. And being in a profession where logic is valued, a lot of people here should know better.

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