Hacker News Reader

Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

I think I'm just surprised and saddened that HN heaps so much hatred on P6. I mean, we're a community of hackers: do we really need to ask "why another programming language"?

The hatred P6 receives here reminds me a lot of the hatred Go used to receive, where every article posted devolved into a discussion regarding the lack of generics. I bought into the "Go is a regression" meme for a long time until I started using it to solve real problems at work, and now I love it.

I hope that we programmers can learn to rejoice in each other's creations rather than to heap scorn and criticism on anything not from our particular tribe. It reminds me of people who insist that you can only like a single video game console... heaven forbid you use more than one, or one with inferior graphics (but with more fun games!), etc.

View on HN

Here's my take on it:

Hackers or not, we're all still human, and experience emotions like frustration and disappointment. Back when perl6 was first being discussed (what was it, 15 years ago now?), probably a lot of us were getting a ton of mileage out of the remarkable perl5 ecosystem.

When perl6 started getting promoted, it seemed like it took a lot of the wind out of the perl5 sails, like an Osborne effect for a programming language.

When the years ticked by and nothing came of it, and lots of moved onto other languages, I imagine a lot of people still remembered being disappointed at how the perl5->6 situation played out.

Probably some of the negativity is just remnants of that, because, like I said, we're all still human.

And schadenfreude, I'm sure, plays into it, like when the overhyped disappointments Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever were released...

Anyway, just one man's opinion, of course...

I don't see hatred in this discussion. I see lots of puzzlement and confusion though. This might be because the article doesn't really accomplish what the title promises as the features and examples given don't feel compelling to most of the people in this discussion.

I don't know if Perl programmers have been separated from the other scripting languages too much as not to understand that there are different mindsets out there.

Perl has always been quite a confusing language if you only skimmed it (lots of incoherent features and more than one way to do it), so I find it natural that Perl6 isn't any better.

But if you don't explain the confusing features of a language well enough, puzzlement and confusion is what you get.

I don't know if Perl programmers have been separated from the other scripting languages too much as not to understand that there are different mindsets out there.

My impression is rather that the P6 marketing has traditionally focused on presenting a long list of features instead of a user-focused business case.

> I mean, we're a community of hackers: do we really need to ask "why another programming language"?

If not us, then who? There is plenty of space for a language that delivers real innovation, or even one that puts real polish on old ideas. But when a language does neither, we absolutely should be asking what it's for. A community that prides itself on being pragmatic and delivering business value should know the costs of language proliferation.

Gradual typing, reactive programming, PEG grammars and language extension via those grammars... the list goes on. Innovation and polish abounds, yet we have comments like yours, which are completely uninformed. I thought HN was better than this, but perhaps there's no escaping eternal september.

Also "correct" unicode support, treating grapheme clusters as characters.

> There is plenty of space for a language that delivers real innovation, or even one that puts real polish on old ideas. But when a language does neither, we absolutely should be asking what it's for

Oh please. Perl 6 does both of these very nicely. Dismissing it out of hand as you have just done is exactly what the parent is complaining about.

Much of the "hatred" seems to come from those who have a lot of preconceived notions about Perl (either 5 or 6). However, I look at the people who approach the language with curiosity and no baggage, and the reactions I often see range from "that's cool" to "holy shit, that's cool."

Perl 6 doesn't deserve as many HN postings as it gets. The original Perl was a version of awk and sed on steroids, back at a time when that was fresh and new (the early 90s). Over the years, people realized that "there is more than one way to do it" was a terrible idea, and languages like Python and Ruby were born to be "like Perl, but better." Now even those languages are showing their age, because of the limitations of dynamic typing and weak runtimes. Perl 6 is just more of the same, 15 years too late. Even the most smelly pile of lisp macros still smells as fresh as a rose compared to this toxic pile of syntax.

HN hates everything that isn't Go these days. Try having a civil discussion about node.js and the top comment will be from someone who tried it once for their first project and 3 years later it was an unmaintainable nightmare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com