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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they got burned by Perl 6/Raku. That had tons of new features but took so long to deliver that it became a burden. Anyway, I think you're right: they have to be more proactive than just going for "feature parity with a modern language".

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> I wonder if they got burned by Perl 6/Raku.

I have the same feeling. I've been programming Perl since mid 90s, and I was - as many others - hyped when Perl 6 was announced early 2000s. 20 years later, it's just different programming language in my eyes; I won't spend any time on it, because if I need Perl, Perl 5.x will do just fine.

Unfortunately, because of Perl 6/Parrot/Raku, or what the current name is, I think it made many developers get off the Perl train. There are lots of good frameworks for Perl that makes it super-easy to get something up and running really quickly;

    * Mojolicious (and its multitude of plugins, Minion etc.)
    * DBIx::Class (not pretty, but still just works)
    * Moose/Mouse (for decent OOP)
    * JSON::Validator (and friends, for mocking and validating)

The list goes on, but this is the "out of the box"-stuff for me to get up and running with something, if not just a prototype of something.

Wasn't Perl 6 itself a reaction to the fact that a lot of developers already leaving for PHP in the web space and Python in the "I need something like a shell script, but need/want a real programming language".

I honestly don't remember. Nor do I care anymore. :)

No. http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p...

As Jon Orwant (supposedly) said in 2000 (quoting from the article you linked):

> we are fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things

Yeah, Perl 6 created a lot of confusion especially inside the Perl 5 community. But, in the end, they figured it all out: Perl 5 lives on and Perl 6 got out of its way by renaming itself to Raku. And, for the record: Raku itself is a gem of a language, I believe. A pretty solid OO system, optional typing, powerful language constructs, stellar Unicode support and somehow it is still staying true to Perl's rather pragmatic and, if I may say so, libertarian approach to software developing. I personally love raku's "grammars" most because they render writing parsers a routine job, it's amazing and no other programming language provides such a feature.

If you're interested I strongly suggest you to check out Brian D Foy's book on Raku: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-perl-6/9781491....

How about the reported Perl6 / Raku speed issues? Saying "reported" because I have not done an in-depth study if they exist, just read about it briefly somewhere (and a while ago, may a year or so). If they did/do exist, was/is anything being done about them? Asking because I, for one, found both Perl 5 and 6 interesting, and the language features of both, somewhat unusual and powerful.

I think Raku is still quite a bit slower. But I am not up-to-date with the latest state. However, this is "just" a matter of optimization of the interpreter over time. It's just that Perl 5's interpreter had a head start of more than 25 years.

Yes, that is possible. Java was dead slow early on (I first used it soon after it came out, and pioneered use of servlets in my company at the time), but after Sun's management threw millions of dollars and high-end tech people at the problem, it got fast enough for many uses in a few years, what with the Hotspot VM and JIT tech and so on.

Sorry, the millions of dollars was mostly for marketing (which is largely what led to its huge adoption), but at least some of that money would have been used to hire top people like computer science compiler specialist PhDs to work on making it faster. I had read about that at around that time.

Raku outperforms perl5 and cpython on quite a few benchmarks, and has for a couple of years now. Some of the ‘nice’ features have pathological performance, but if it becomes a problem in practice you have recourse.

Hope so. Want to try it out. I bought and read most of the llama and camel books years ago, at Perl v4 or so. Ditto for the Perl Cookbook. (All 3 by O'Reilly. Some of those Cookbooks were very good. Also had the Python and Java Cookbooks.)

Enjoyed them (the Perl books). But didn't get a chance to use Perl in non-trivial real projects.

Raku is a significantly higher level language than most languages. Which tends to lead to slowness.

Really it's faster in many places than it has any right to.

    @a[1];

Is just shorthand for a subroutine call.

    postcircumfix:< [ ] >( @a, 1 );

Which ends up calling a method.

    @a.AT-POS( 1 );

Actually that is also a simplification as AT-POS is probably a multi method. Not to mention inheritance.

There is even a level under that, NQP. (simplified example below)

    my $reified := nqp::getattr(@a, List, '$!reified');
    my $result  := nqp::atpos($reified, $pos);

All of those levels of indirection have a cost associated with them.

---

It just Rakudo on MoarVM has a bunch of optimizations to remove the needed complexity at some point. Either during compilation, or after it's been running for a while.

So with those optimizations it can sometimes beat other higher level languages. (For some specific uses it may even sometimes meet or exceed the speed of low level languages like C/C++. Mainly for algorithmic reasons.)

More optimizations would always be nice though.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply. Just saw it now. I get it.

I recommend going to https://raku.org/ and reading up on the language because Raku actually has features “modern languages” do not. E.G. the grammars.

I don't remember anyone paying much attention to perl6 before long after perl had peaked. It was for a while seen as an potential savior for perl but that faded too.

It was more about PHP, Ruby and Python entering the stage and diluting the market for scripting languages by each offering something special that one set of users really wanted weather it be an easier deployment path better standard libraries or a more beginner friendly community.

There is no "wonder". They did.

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