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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time.

Perl6 was promised. Then it never happened. It's now an almost quarter century later. The world has moved on. Taking that long for a single version update in a language is not reasonable. I loved Perl. I still love Perl5. But I've moved on and have 100% blocked Perl6 from my psyche and list of expectations. No one I know uses it. I am not excited by it. I dont need it. And I don't care to hear these discussions about minutia related to it. It's a debacle and a case study in the failure of what was a beautifully ugly practical performant language.

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... which is the whole point of renaming it, right?

"Oh, it took too long to update Perl and now Perl is dead" is true.

"Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features, and excels at this particular type of problem" can also be true. But nobody can hear this message while they keep thinking about Perl.

I doubt it.

"Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features..." will be met with "Oh, you mean Perl 6? lol."

If Perl is dead, renaming the last version isn't going to change anything.

Dead, regarding Perl 6, is an interesting thing.

It doesn't mean "no developers or support" because that's at least as true of newly invented languages that HN loves to get excited about. CPAN is a thing and has been for decades.

It doesn't mean "doesn't work, not delivered yet" because there it is.

It doesn't mean "no exciting features" because that's not true either.

It seems to be more of a condemnation than a description. I suspect it's really just a synonym for "passé, uncool, brings back memories of the 1990s I was trying to forget".

It's usually more indicative of a language that's found in existing codebases, but is no longer used to start new ones. If you join a team and someone in that team actually knows Perl, that's highly unusual these days.

It's the same kind of "dead" as Latin: lots of folks actively use it, but meeting someone that does is pretty dang unusual unless you work for the Catholic church, in which case "everyone still uses it, what's dead about it?"

"There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead." - Miracle Max

Perl isn't dead. It's a perfectly good, stable language with excellent library support. It's just not sexy and new, so there's no buzz about it.

Perl6, on the other hand, is effectively another language altogether, and I hope they rename it completely to stop the confusion.

I am not a developer, but a sysadmin, and I don't know much about perl since I haven't used it much in the last 15 years. But I do know that if you have to run commands for CPAN to install some packages your developer says are required, your in for a bad day.

I agree, but part of the problem is that CPAN is old, i.e. it's been around for years, so you can find very out-of-date documentation and advice on the web about how to install packages.

For example, if you find a page suggesting you run 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', and you try using that, you'll probably have a very bad time. Watch out for it trying to upgrade perl itself! There are newer, saner and nicer ways to access CPAN and install packages.

There's also possible conflicts between CPAN and your distribution's own packaged perl modules, but that's a common problem with any software you install yourself rather than through the distro's packaging scheme.

Look into cpanm, local::lib, the Cpanfile, perlbrew, and carton. There are multiple angles of attacking this issue that are better than the old CPAN shell.

Please investigate local::lib.

Never had a problem myself doing that - your developers should have sent a list of what modules need installing and deltas for every release.

Most likely, but as a Hail Mary last-ditch effort, it seems reasonable and probably better than nothing. "Raku" sounds at least 1% more interesting for a dev to look into trying than "Perl 6".

It's not the last version. There are two latest versions of Perl, the perl5 variant, currently at 5.30.0, and the Perl 6 variant, but they use the Microsoft convention of years in the name.

Both have huge problems, perl5 being effectively dead and the most hated language amongst devs. (I'm still trying to save it via cperl though).

And Perl 6 interesting (I was the parrot backend maintainer, until they ditched it), but with no significant future.

Someone else suggested renaming Perl 5 to Perl 7, and that has some merits so long as it is 100% backwards compatible (no Python 3 improvements).

Maybe add a few default warnings for using "ugly" features - maybe just in a linter - perhaps not affecting the runtime at all?

One of TypeScript's strengths is that it is JavaScript, but you can configure tslint to help detect certain "bad" JavaScript. Or you can switch on stricter checks (and TypeScript could be just a name for a default list of strict error checks, depending on how you use it!).

Perl5 has linters (Perl::Critic, Perl::Lint). And warnings to keep you from using ugly features (if you assert compatibility with the 2010 release 5.12, strict mode is automatically turned on).

JavaScript actually copied its `‘use strict’` syntax from Perl's `use strict;` which in Perl is using a pragma, not a magical string literal that reconfigures the compiler.

You want types? Several systems exist, but the leading implementation is Type::Tiny.

A big part of Perl culture in the late 2000s and early 2010s was focused around rooting out horrible old practices and tutorials, defining good practices, and getting tooling to help. Perl Best Practices came out of in 2005. Some effort to describe these tools and techniques as “modern Perl” followed—check out the inaugural entry of the Modern Perl Books blog from 2009. http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/01/

Since Perl5 did what you’re asking for, maybe you should check it out and see what Perl 5 looks like in 2019.

perl 7 would be a major bump beyond perl 6, but perl 5 has not even caught to 10% of Perl 6 yet. This a non goal for them.

For me it's the top goal, but I'm still only at 20%.

Calling this perl7 would have been a huge joke. Renaming the thing also doesn't help with the personnel who is doing the desastrous decisions they did in the last decade. Management need to change, not the name.

Perl6 is factually wrong name, it's absolutely new language and as such deserves different name

>The world has moved on.

Except that it hasn't. What other language does everything P6 does? (Or even tries, let alone does it as well or better.) What language does "most" or "a lot" of it? To be honest, I would have expected that after a couple of decades, there would be other languages that stole a lot of P6's thunder, but if there is anything remotely comparable, I haven't heard of it.

P6 is an surprisingly ambitious project. (I think even surprisingly so to its creators.) Apparently it just takes this long to do something that big and powerful.

> What other language does everything P6 does?

Why would any language do what Perl 6 does? Languages do what they need and typically do at least some things Perl 6 doesn't do and at least some things do better than Perl 6 does them. Sometimes such things are much more important to people than everything Perl 6 does.

You’re ignoring the comment two above you. The suggestion was that there are no uses for Perl 6. That implies there’s at least one language that does what it does. There is not.

If you need real rational number math and are doing a lot of text processing for example, there might not be a better alternative.

What's that noise? It feels like conceptual potential being poured down a drain. It kindof goes "blub, blub, blub..."

What has changed in the programming world so much that Perl 6 (or raku, or whatever it will be called) is now irrelevant? Seems to me we still have the same problems we did when Perl 6 started. In fact, one of its graces, parallelism, no GIL, is an asset now with multi-core. Reactive programming is popular now which is built into perl 6. Functional programming is now more popular which is built into perl 6. Serving web requests and parsing json is popular now and that's super easy to do with perl 6.

Possibly the latest thing that perl 6 does not do (and most languages don't do) is heterogenous computing (GPU/CPU, etc). But perl 6 strength is that it can drop into a new language DSL inline without issue so if any language will just freely mix GPGPU and normal CPU compute in a nice way it could be perl 6. Wonder if anyone in the community is working on that...

I don't need a language with everything built in anymore.

The "one tool to do all of the sysadmin's hacks" isn't much of a thing. Instead of the monolithic system and all of its services, we're moving to smaller and smaller systems in smaller and smaller containers.

As I've gotten older, the cost of going back and trying to read the old code has gotten more and more mentally expensive. Code that doesn't provide a reasonable way (as in "way that can be reasoned about") to be read gets slowly replaced by that which I can get back into the mindset of when I wrote it quicker.

Perl 6 with its myriad of operators is unreasonable. What does ⊖ or ∅ mean? Or −= (note the unicode U+2212 minus sign vs the traditional minus sign - are they different? edit: ok, I can't even add the unicode 'atom' symbol here) or »=«? How do you even type those?

I enjoyed perl 5. I'll still code in it for a quick script... but I'm finding myself leaning more and more to groovy for the scripts in part because I've been writing Java for the two decades rather than perl.

I don't need the abilities that perl 6 provides and I wouldn't want my coworkers developing a DSL.

Perl 6 brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table... but I don't want them in my code base.

The entire point is to align the name with the reality so that people don't make the exact mistake you made here of thinking that it's a "version update" for Perl.

Okay, but is it a good, useful programming language? In some ways, the long development timeline suggests a slower, more stable way of doing language changes that appeals a lot to me.

I think so. I regularly use JS and Java in daily life and used to use a whole host other languages in the past.

Perl 6 is actually a joy to code in, as weird as that sounds. It's fairly straightforward to begin using, but the deeper I go the more I see the huge benefit to its long development which was mainly in spec-writing. The two killer features (for my work, at least) have been the grammars (a sort of regex on steroids that is actually readable) and the multiparadigm approach. I mean you can do functional coding with Javascript sort of, but you end up with a lot of extra line noise compared to P6 where it was contempalted from the beginning (and multisubs clear things up even more). All the typical paradigms are integrated fairly seamlessly to let you choose the best tool for the job for whatever block of coding you're working on.

The type system and multiple get rid of so much “if this then do that” code.

  multi sub eat-pie( Pie slice where *.is-custard ) { ... }
  
  multi sub eat-pie( Pie slice where *.is-fruit ) { ... }

  multi sub eat-pie( Pie slice ) { ... }

  eat-pie( a-slice-of-pie );

That’s just awesome.

Since you had to ask, I'm guessing you don't use it either.

I don't use it yet, either. Why are you trying to make it sound like a new language needs instant adoption, or it's dead for all time? It's not going to expire if it takes a few years.

There are two programming languages that I learned in their first 5 years. They both ended up being languages I dislike. A language that takes time to mature and isn't the pop language of the week sounds terrific to me.

Good languages stay in use for decades. If I miss the first 5-10 years of a new programming language, either I'll skip its turbulent youth and still be around for most of its life, or it'll turn out to have been a flash-in-the-pan language and I'll have missed nothing.

Well you can take a look fairly easily with this https://perl6intro.com/ and this https://glot.io/new/perl6

If you want to be fancy you can run the JS implementation of the Rakudo compiler in browser targeting JS https://perl6.github.io/6pad/#b66f6f0eb46f296b8a285c45a152f1...

That doesn't mean there's not a reason to start using it.

Perl6 is not “a single version update” of perl5. It’s an entirely new language.

So is Ruby. So is Python.

Which is why they're not called Perl 7 and Perl 8 respectively

True, although Ruby is called Ruby because rubies the birthstone of the month after the month for which pearls are the birthstone.

I might be the odd one, but every talk about perl 6 I've seen picked my interest a lot in terms of expressivity and metaprogramming done in nice ways. Its relevance might be out of sync with the trends, but I believe good ideas are forever.. and perl 6 seems to have a few. Just wait 40 years.

If Perl6 is ever performant, I'll be dropping Python for a lot of Scripting uses.

Perl6 is a big language, but has a lot of power and beauty.

For what it's worth, for maybe half of my scripting purposes, Perl 6 was already performant enough back in 2010. The big things I remember it having speed issues on were things you wouldn't normally have considered Perl 5 a solution for, like using a grammar to parse a multi-megabyte CAD file or calculate a Mandelbrot set using elegant high-level code.

Today, while those two things are still slow enough in Perl 6 I wouldn't make Perl 6 my primary language for doing them, I can't even remember the last time I wrote a script in Perl 6 and it was too slow to be usable.

Mind, I think Perl 5 is still faster on things Perl 5 was super-optimized for -- regex processing, for instance. But on a normal week, I throw together a couple of quick Perl 6 scripts to get stuff done. It's usually a joy to program in and execution speed just hasn't been a problem for me.

The article mentions this:

>Perl 6 performance has now gotten to the point where it's often comparable to Perl 5 or surpasses it. It still needs some work in this area, but the work is clear, the goals are straightforward, and Perl 6 is going to easily oustrip Perl 5 in terms of performance.

I hope it's true. Perl was a great language that was ahead of it's time. Eg, most complaints about Perl boil down to needing an equivalent of PEP8 and a linter.

Yeah too bad it's slow. I write Perl 5 code at work on a daily basis and really wanted to like Perl6. Too late, too slow.

Lizormato and some other folks have put in hundreds of performance fixes...I think these things just take time. The language might have been in development and design since the 90's, but it only just got to 1.0 or a "stable release" in 2017 I think. I'm surprised Larry Wall hasn't written a Perl6 book yet. Plenty of other authors have, but I was really looking forward to something from him or Damien Conway.

I've installed just about every release since 2017. It's a nice language but still slow and lacking library support. The best thing about it is probably the rational math.

Thanks for the information!

Yea... libraries are always good (especially for math and analysis), but I find that powerful languages need far fewer libraries to get things done. APL can do something with a few characters that might commonly be implemented as a lengthy function or library in some languages.

Windows Powershell can surprisingly do a lot of what Perl 6 can do and people mostly understand the limitations. You can automate processes, build your own DSL, have full OO support, full .NET interop, concurrency, you can pipe data around kind of like with FP...etc. It doesn't have some of the more perlish features though.

Some things are already significantly faster, but there are other common operations that are still slower.

I wonder if the JIT will interfere with scripts where startup time is not acceptable?

I did some tests for prime number crunching. For example the C-style loop statement is faster than Perl's own foreach. Perl6 was the slowest of them all while the fastest was LuaJIT. The whole code is two loops with a bunch of multiplications and additions, an array push, loading a hash and looking up values in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720027

This seems like a very odd standard to use? I understand that you wanted to compare performances of different languages, that's great.

But if you actually wanted to get the job done idiomatically, the code is one short, simple line of Perl 6. The performance, while admittedly slower, is within the same order of magnitude as your Perl 5 version.

To me, this is the magic of Perl 6. Sure, if you want to use 16 lines of loopy integer-crunching code to calculate the first N primes and you care about speed, Perl 6 should not be your choice. On the other hand, if you'd prefer to say

  (1..$N).grep(*.is-prime)

and get the answer back in reasonable speed, Perl 6 is perfect.

It's just stuff that I use daily in normal code, so this benchmark pretty much serves the pupose very well: it uses mundane operations, also uses memory, one can adjust it by raising the bar 10x times, so the actual algorithm takes several orders of magnitude longer than the JIT penalty. In fact most of the interpreted languages would pretty much crunch for minutes at 10⁴, while Go, Crystal, D and Rust would take seconds or tens of seconds. Perl6 is basically stuck there forever and at the other end of the spectrum are Node and Dart. LuaJIT would run out of memory at that figure, otherwise it's among the fastest.

That is impressive!

There have been _many_ version updates to Perl over the last 20 years. By my count, at least around 12. The last update was just this may.

Your view is pretty much exactly what they're trying to address with the name change. Check out the github issue https://github.com/perl6/problem-solving/issues/81

The plethora of languages out there shows that there is space for a lot of them. Perl6 is still more useful and relevant than most.

>And I don't care to hear these discussions about minutia related to it.

and yet, here you are :D

This seems like an ignorant mindset. Not only is P6 not a "single version update" (which shows ignorance about what the language actually is) but it has features to rival any dynamically typed language today and supersedes many of them. If you don't care to "hear these discussions about the minutia related to it", what was the point in your comment other than to say you're not personally interested in it? But it's hard to gauge if you actually are interested in it since you have "blocked it from [your] psyche" so you couldn't possibly know if it's any good.

It is probably more reasonable to block a comment which appears to have nothing of value (except in proclaiming its own ignorance) from our collective psyches.

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