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Comment by 3rdAccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm always impressed with the size of the problem that the Perl6 core team is trying to solve relative to the number of volunteers and funding.

It is a really nice language based off of all the tutorials and presentations I've watched. It just needs some better performance before I'll really start using it and I think there are many in the community that are in the same boat. It's a pity, because it's a chicken or the egg kind of problem. I would try to help, but when it comes to computer science I am a consumer and not a producer (I have my own large projects in my domain :)).

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> It is a really nice language based off of all the tutorials and presentations I've watched. It just needs some better performance before I'll really start using it

I'm also very impressed in how the language is turning out. It's a pleasure to write and read. I know most people really don't like Unicode operators, but I find them to be very useful. They're short and concise, and allow those writing mathematical equations to stick to their regular symbols. And for those that don't know how to do Unicode on their OS/editor, there's ASCII equivalents.

Performance-wise, it seems to be fast enough for all my personal projects, and it's getting faster every release. Is there a certain piece of code that you want to have running within a certain amount of time? That would allow you (and Perl 6 devs) to have a goal to look at, and work towards.

Running grammars past very large datasets. You hear enough people talk about the performance and you decide to stay away a bit until things improve. I also have some numeric code and that is generally probably not a great P6 fit (more of a Python + Numpy thing).

As a general scripting language, P6 looks nice as a lot of features such as concurrency that are aren't super straightforward (Ex: python) seem to be dead simple in P6.

Perl 6 was designed in part to allow PDL (Perl Data Language) type features to be added easily.

In fact some things that you would do in PDL have already been added, they just currently aren't as fast as they could be.

    (1,2,3; 4,5,6; 7,8,9) »**» 2
    (1,4,9; 16,25,36; 49,64,81)

The above is specifically allowed to do all of the operations in parallel, but doesn't currently. (Perhaps even on a GPU)

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