Perl 6 doesn't have a GIL, and already has a sane concurrency model, but the lack of libraries and community interest seems to make that pretty much a non-starter.
Also, if you use .subst(‘y’, ’n’) instead of a regex it runs in under 9 seconds locally. Thats still much slower than perl 5 (which locally takes less than half a second) but they’re making great strides at improving performance.
time yes | head -n1000000 | perl6 --profile -e 'for $*IN.readchars { .subst("y", "n").print }’ > /dev/null
time echo "#include <stdio.h>
main(n){char*b,*s=n=0;getdelim(&s,&n,-1,stdin);for(b=s;*s;++s)*s=='y'&&*s='n';puts(b);}">s.c|yes|head -n1000000|tcc -w -run s.c>/dev/null
real 0m0.028s
user 0m0.023s
sys 0m0.019s
Hopefully more edge cases will be discovered and fixed as the implementation matures as well.
I used to carry around a Perl program of my own on a printout to take to VLSI interviews. That way when I got the "Do you know Perl?" question I could bring it out and force the interviewer into MY stupid subset of Perl rather than being stuck in his stupid subset of Perl.
That's not a compliment to the language.
Why do I see Python programs that look like a weird mix of Lisp and Java? Surely it is because even with what Python enforce, there are many many ways to produce unclear code that really don't even has to do with the language used.
And why did my employer see the need for the comprehensive Python style guidelines manual... I guess Python bit just as hard as Perl.
Also now that Python is used more by newbies and non-programmers that is where more of the bad code end up (aka Perl late 90s, still pollutes the internet). The quality of Perl frameworks, libs, example code etc is actually increasing and getting easier to find.
I'll stick my neck out and say that personally I feel that Python is actually better in this regard. Perl pissed me off so much that I left Perl at the height of its popularity. I probably had least 5 years(probably closer to 10+, but my memory of dates is fuzzy--pretty sure I never used Perl 3, though ...) years of professional use of Perl under my belt at that point.
I still migrated to Python.
That's a pretty big indictment when someone is willing to go back to being a n00b rather than continue to put up with continuing grief.
> Why do I see Python programs that look like a weird mix of Lisp and Java? Surely it is because even with what Python enforce, there are many many ways to produce unclear code that really don't even has to do with the language used.
The difference, from my experience, is that newbies in Python don't write code that A) other newbies can't understand and B) requires excessive mental effort from experienced folks to understand. Neither of those were true in my experience for Perl. A newb in Perl would very quickly trip something that would boggle even your local Perl expert.
I remember when I was a beginner and posted a 15 line program to comp.lang.perl and watched several of the experts actually wondering what the correct interpretation of the grammar was. I don't think I ever managed to cause something like that in Python. Obviously, I threw that program out post haste.
Sure, people can make amazingly complicated things with generators, decorators, etc once they get the hang of the language. However, newbies don't normally do this in Python. As you point out, they normally write it like Java (for better and worse).
In Perl, newbies immediately had to grapple with things like list vs scalar context and god help you if you tripped over a corner case (although, to be fair, God, in the form Randall Schwartz, WOULD quite often help you if you asked on comp.lang.perl ...)
> And why did my employer see the need for the comprehensive Python style guidelines manual... I guess Python bit just as hard as Perl.
I would personally expect that any company writing a very large quantity of code would produce a style guide for any language they use.
> The quality of Perl frameworks, libs, example code etc is actually increasing and getting easier to find.
That's actually really cool.