Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be snarky but... Ok, sorry I'm going to be snarky.

In all honesty, does anyone even care about Perl 6 at this point? It's become the Duke Nukem Forever of programming languages as far as I can tell.

Back in the 90s I remember the first CGI scripts I wrote were in Perl but really... the world has moved on.

View on HN

You should, even if you don't use it. It's highly likely that ideas that come from Perl 6 will be adopted in some form in most other major languages at some point.

Perl's weird, it just takes a bit of everything (and not in a C++ kind of "be" everything), tosses it in a blender and then suddenly everybody has or wants smoothies in their language.

A short list of what I think we'll see percolating over to other places:

- some of the better syntactic sugar ideas, like blocks and closures, comma as a list constructor, chained comparisons

- what will probably be best-in-class Unicode support

- autothreading

- further improvements to the way regexes are used

- grammars

- junctions could become the next "thing" in lots of languages

- elements of the module system, like using two versions at once without conflict

- the different parameter passing modes

- the current Perl culture around testing

- bags and sets

- the continued relevance and model of CPAN

Has it? If we're talking about Python or Ruby, I'd regard that as a small move sideways, not onwards. It's pretty much the same family of languages, and Perl6 almost seems like a new member of it, yet another alternative for Perl5, not necessarily the most likely upgrade path.

If we're talking about the world having moved on to either Haskell, Erlang or Go, Rust, well, I don't really see that being as pervasive as it often appears on trend-seeking sites like this.

And I really hope we're not talking about JavaScript…

Maybe, the alternative perl, "Perlb"? I'd also agree with the "perpetual playground" comment, and note that Perl6 originated not as something needed, but as a way to keep the developer band together.

Plus, I've always noticed a tendency in Perl in the last few years to be interesting/entertaining... sort of like it was designed by science fiction writers.

Minus the snarkiness, that's not a bad question. The linked article doesn't showcase most of the interesting stuff in Perl 6 like optional typing, junctions or macros, but there are some cool things about it.

That said, I think Python has eaten Perl's lunch, and who knows how things will evolve with the proliferation of statically-typed, non-verbose, fast functional languages? Personally, I'm not going back to dynamic languages as my primary workhorse.

Personally, the features I'm most interested in are ones you didn't actually list. They are

- grammars

- grapheme-based Unicode

- implicit parallelism

This is why Perl6 is still relevant today. Larry is hopeful that Rakudo can deliver sometime next year (not all of these features are quite there yet), but even if it doesn't, the language will remain of interest as long as there is no serious contender in sight.

I'm not following the Perl community, but I loved seeing some of Damian Conway's talk (mostly on very very fine and inspiring first class grammar) on P6, do you know some good articles about Perl6 new/weird ideas ?

Haskell and ocaml fit the bill, but aren't new... which ones do you mean?

The difference is that Haskell has gotten way more popular in the last few years, but you can take for example Scala or F#.

OK, I thought you meant there were many more such languages - but "proliferated" means spread, so my mistake, yours is valid use.

Yes, Haskell is better known, but not proliferated in real-world usage (though jq was based on it). F# and Scala aren't seeing much adoption.

I do think type inference will be borrowed from them (and pr many other features), but not pure fp (it makes some tasks unnecessarily difficult). The growth of dynamic typed languages suggests to me that developers value ease of development over almost everthing.

I check in with what's going on in the Perl community every so often because I find I usually learn a lot more from them than, say, from the Ruby or Python community.

Perl 6 does seem to have become a perpetual playground for language experimentation, but that hardly makes it Duke Nukem Forever -- you can use it for that today.

Perl 5 is alive and well, seeing regular updates, and seems to have a future, even if its glory days as far as mindshare are over.

Kool kid won't care, they're already builds next big thing with nodejs anyway..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com