Perl 6.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Perl 6.0 released

github.com

112 pointskamaal28 comments

I'm getting really bored with all the JS frameworks. Is it time to get back into perl?

Cassette tapes are hip again, why not perl. :-)

When you put it like that, it kind of makes sense. BTW, it is vinyl records. My best friend got obsessed with them, I have to buy them as gifts all the time.

Good thing tbh. The perfect audio quality is just, perfect.

No, it's cassettes too. Reel to reel has "better sound" than vinyl for some people. I'm sure there's some metric or science to back up the argument.

And other enjoy the nostalgia of cassettes and eight tracks. You can hardly walk down my block without seeing someone listening to a 30 year old walkman. That's probably more of a style thing.

As someone who uses tapes on a regular basis, I have doubts that there is any metric or science to back up the argument that cassette tapes have 'better sound' than vinvyl record or digital audio for that matter.

Part of what I enjoy about listening to tapes is in fact its subpar quality. The main reason I listen to tapes is because my two cars both take cassette tapes, so it's more a reason to have something to listen to while driving. But in a car, the small distortions on a tape are easily missed compared to listening at home. So it works great for me.

(Plus the silence at the end of each side is a great break every 40 minutes or so.)

I'm not talking about cassettes, I'm talking about the reel to reels that they used to use to record masters.

You are right, I researched a little in the meantime :) amazing!

I remember cassettes as convenient but with a lot of issues with sound quality.

As an old perl 5 hack it is worth looking at as a new language. Like if you thought rust was worth exploring. It's not related to perl historically at all except by name.

... and that there are interop modules (between Perl 6 and Perl 5.x), IIRC.

... and plans for equally quality interop with other langs, such as Python and Ruby. The only thing special about the perl5 one is that it came first.

WebAssembly is not ready yet.

I, for one, was too young for the original Perl craze.

But somehow I had a pocket reference to Perl 5 that my mom put on my desk, because it was in the house and she assumed it was mine -- I must have picked it up somewhere and forgot about it.

I'm taking this as a sign to learn Perl 6.

Congrats to all the people who have worked on this important project over the years!

I look forward to experimenting with Perl6 soon.

The bulleted description sounds almost exactly like a description of Ruby, and I don't mean this sarcastically.

I've been thinking that one advertising angle is to claim that Perl6 is more the successor to Ruby than it is to Perl5 :)

Quite a bit of Ruby was borrowed from Perl. It shouldn't be surprising that they share some characteristics. But, it's silly to say Perl 6 "sounds almost exactly" like Ruby. There's a huge variety of stuff Perl 6 has that Ruby does not, at least not as a core part of the language.

Except that Ruby's translation into English was literally the cause of Perl's decline.

Perl was intended to be a highly concise shell-like language that excelled at text processing. Partly in order to achieve such concision, the syntax overloaded various symbols to mean completely different things in different syntactic contexts, which made it very difficult for humans to parse quickly unless they worked in it very frequently (I recall the authors of either the llama or camel book estimating five times a week as the minimum). As Perl grew in popularity, objects were added on, and the whole language felt cobbled together. Perl users mainly used it as a shell replacement or for CGI scripts. Larger projects tended to be the domain of Python (or Java if concision was no longer a requirement).

And then came Ruby with syntax that was friendlier to Perl programmers than Perl itself, yet was semantically consistent, had built-in object support, and could rival Python for projects of any size, while surpassing it for the "quick and dirty scripts" that Perl excelled at. The conversation stopped being about Perl vs. Python and became Ruby vs. Python. People stopped using Perl 5.

So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5.

"So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5."

On that, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Oh, I'm not asserting that it is, just that it sounds like it might be, based on the description in the Github README. If you're actually familiar with Perl 6 and don't view that to be true, I'd trust your assessment over my hypothesis!

I'd recommend you take a look. It's certainly got some of the features of Ruby that had to be bolted on to Perl 5 (objects, for example), but it's still recognizably Perl, and it has a number of features built-in nicely that feel bolted-on or just downright ornery in Ruby (Unicode, concurrency, to mention two big ones). OOP in Perl 6 is beyond anything I've used anywhere else, except maybe Moose on Perl 5 (which is bolted-on).

I think the most accurate thing to say is that there has been a lot of cross-pollination between Perl and Ruby, it goes both ways, and it has been going on for the entire life of Ruby and Perl 6. But, Ruby is Ruby and Perl 6 is recognizably a Perl variant.

And it only took a decade of promises. On to Perl 7.

Perl 6 was actually more than a decade coming. It was first conceived around 2000. And, Perl 6 is likely to last as long as Perl 5, which is to say, 20+ years (so far, for Perl 5, but it's got at least another 5-10 years in it as a maintenance language for millions of lines of code in the wild). Though, since Perl 5 maintained compatibility with Perl 4 and earlier, and continues to do so today (mostly), one could probably categorize all of Perl <6 as one entity, and Perl 6 as another language.

And, while we're speaking of promises, I believe that was a feature that came relatively late in the development of Perl 6, but it is a nice implementation from what I can tell. Here's the docs: http://doc.perl6.org/type/Promise

This is a clickbait and deceptive title. It should read "Rakudo Perl 6.0 Support Added" or at best "Rakudo Perl 6.0 Released".

https://twitter.com/TimToady/status/680511168713064448

What? I'm fairly certain you are mistaken on quite a lot of details. Larry Wall is behind this release, and even though this is one implementation of Perl 6, that's an intentional difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6. There is no one implementation, just a set of specs and few projects aiming to implement those specs. Rakudo is at this time the most mature implementation, and the specs have been finalized so that a "1.0" version of Perl 6 can be released with an implementation that works.

I wasn't aware that Perl 6 was going to be projects aiming to implement a spec. Nonetheless, I find the title to be misleading, it can be phrased better and more specific. As Larry Wall says in the tweets below, it'd be more exact to say "A Perl 6 Compiler and Test Suite Released".

I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but found this in TLA:

> To be clear on that point, this Rakudo release is not considered the primary deliverable for this Christmas; it is the language specification, known as "roast" (Repository Of All Spec Tests), that is considered the primary deliverable.

I can see why this stuff is confusing.

Perhaps the following will help reduce some of the confusion and highlight what's important.

First, about the title:

1. The article's original title was "Christmas is here". It makes total sense in the main context in which it was supposed to appear (the Perl 6 Advent Calendar). I would likely rename it if I were posting here at HN.

2. The retitle includes "Perl 6.0". This has for years been the informal codename for an eventual "1.0" type release of the Perl 6 language that Larry Wall scheduled in late 2014 for delivery around now.

The deliverables were/are: a version (now called v6.c) of a test suite ("roast") that corresponds to a version v6.c of the Perl 6 language; and a compiler that passes this v6.c roast and thus officially implements this first official version of the Perl 6 language. (I say "officially" to reflect what I understand to be Larry's intent for its use.)

The article linked to by this HN is the first article to:

* Document that the v.6c release has just happened (iiuc, around 22:00 GMT on Dec 25th);

* Provide key release info such as discussion of v6.c and a link to the passing compiler that's part of v6.c.

The passing compiler is the 94th monthly release, on December 25th 2015, of the Rakudo compiler, now the first official Perl 6 compiler. This compiler release clinches deliverable status for the overall v6.c (or "Perl 6.0") release.

I hope this helps. And I hope you HTAAOF with the new Perl 6 and the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. :)

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