lliamander replied that Elixir does too and it's worth a look
To that, 7thaccount replied that Perl6 and Elixir fill different niches.
So far, it seems Perl6 fills a niche that requires scripting and first-class concurrency. My question then is: what is this niche that requires very solid concurrency but also scripting. In other words, what does Perl6 have in terms of concurrency that Python does not (given they are both scripting languages)?
edit: that is, as far as I can tell, after a quick Google, it's not too different from Python's Thread object.
(In that when I translate Go into Raku, I usually replace `go` with `start`.)
my Channel \input .= new;
my Channel \output .= new;
start for input -> \message { output.send(message) }
start for output -> \message { say message }
input.send(5);
sub foo () {
sleep 10;
42
}
# ___
# V V
my $delayed-result = start foo();
say 'Hello World'; # Hello World
say $delayed-result.status; # Planned
say await $delayed-result; # 42To which the answer is “not only does Python not have them, but with the GIL CPython couldn't do much with them even if the language had them.”
I don't know of many instances where scripting and concurrency would be needed in the same application. But if you wanted to use single language both for scripting tasks and applications that require concurrency, then Raku or Elixir would work.
One instance I can actually think of, that would be specific to Erlang/Elixir, is if you have a long running service that you sometimes run batch jobs against (like importing data from a CSV). An Elixir script can hook directly into an Elixir/Erlang service and interact with it using message passing. It's a heck of a lot simpler than RMI, and avoids the need to expose new HTTP endpoints specifically for such tasks.
Some differences:
* You can actually write your whole application in Elixir, whereas I could not see doing that with PowerShell
* In Erlang/Elixir, instead of objects you have processes. Think of your application as a microservice architecture on steroids, using the Erlang RPC protocol as a means for inter-process communication.
Because each process just sends and receives messages, your script can just send messages to any of the processes that make up your application, as if they were your own service. All you have to do is connect to the remote application using the Erlang Distribution Protocol (to connect different runtimes over the network).