
New Perl 6 Homepage - kaokun
http://perl6.org/
======
robotnoises
Larry Wall's discussion on the logo, Camelia
([https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/mu/master/misc/camel...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/mu/master/misc/camelia.txt)):

Discussion Highlights =====================

From: Larry Wall Date: March 24, 2009 10:25 Subject: Re: Logo considerations

[...] I think there's a tendency to go way too abstract in most of these
proposals. I want something with gut appeal on the order of Tux. In particular
I want a logo for Perl 6 that is:

    
    
        Fun
        Cool
        Cute
        Named
        Lively
        Punable
        Personal
        Concrete
        Symmetric
        Asymmetric
        Attractive
        Relational
        Metamorphic
        Decolorizable
        Shrinkable to textual icon
        Shrinkable to graphical icon
    

In addition, you can extend just about anything by attaching "P6" wings to it.
I also take it as a given that we want to discourage misogyny in our
community. You of the masculine persuasion should consider it an opportunity
to show off your sensitive side. :)

Hence, Camelia.

Larry

~~~
justinator
I remember volunteering to create some logo ideas for Perl 6 - maybe a decade
ago? I did research and presented ideas. I was at a step even before thumbnail
sketches - just wanted to get some feedback from the Perl community - am I on
the right track? Any other ideas to look at? [0]

Larry kinda went, "NO IT"S THIS." and there was Camelia.

Honestly, Camelia is just slightly worse than the redesign of The Life Aquatic
Flag/Logo. Which itself was funny, as this was from a comedy [1].

[0]
[http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/01/msg9...](http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/01/msg938.html)

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Life+Aquatic+with+Steve+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Life+Aquatic+with+Steve+Zissou+logo+flag)

~~~
justinator
Ah, I remember now - Larry just posted a PDF of Camelia.[0]

I was under the impression that Larry was banned from being in involved in the
implementation of Perl 6. ;)

I kinda saw that logo and gave up the idea of helping. It was just so horrible
as to defy logic.

Still love Perl and I think a butterfly is a great idea - and even this is a
good as a start, but it's not a strong enough logo for people to have careers
depend upon. Like me. It doesn't even tick all the checkboxes that Larry had.
If you made this logo in an intro design class in art school, you'd be
ridiculed.

[0]
[http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/03/msg9...](http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/03/msg999.html)

------
Ulti
OOC how many people would be interested in a Perl 6 Corporate Look n' Feel
type site? Where everything is just designed to be boring and on message for
production use in a business setting. Front page has Docker deployment and
continuous integration setup steps etc. (that all exists and works FYI)
Everything would be muted colours and mostly cloning the style of
[https://www.haskell.org/](https://www.haskell.org/) or
[https://nodejs.org/en/](https://nodejs.org/en/) or even as spartan as
[https://www.rust-lang.org/](https://www.rust-lang.org/)

I love Perl 6 but I utterly reject and hate the Fisher Price look and feel. It
makes it impossible to have a serious conversation at work about Perl 6 or get
anyone less than light hearted to care about taking a look at the language.
There is so much great stuff there, and basically none of it is for children.
I'd go as far to say as Perl 6 would be an awful language for very young
children. Something like Scratch has put the effort in there. The idea of
Camelia being friendly to kids is a great sentiment... but thats as deep as
anyone's effort or considerations have gone for children learning to program
in the Perl 6 community. IMHO anyone who feels that's a harsh assessment has
probably never attempted to teach programming to young children, I have! It's
a near impossible task, and the last thing you touch is syntax or
documentation websites. I cant help but feel Camelia and her scheming colours
are ham stringing adoption by anyone else looking in from their cubicle or
startup loft. Maybe I'm very wrong and everyone loves the bug?

~~~
andrewl
I think there's something to this. Whether it's logical or not, a language is
partially judged on its web site. The Ruby and Python sites are less
whimsical:

[https://www.ruby-lang.org](https://www.ruby-lang.org)

[https://www.python.org](https://www.python.org)

I want the language given a chance based on its merits, not dismissed because
of a cartoonish site.

~~~
phillc73
I think the R homepage is pretty much perfect:

[https://www.r-project.org/](https://www.r-project.org/)

Who wouldn't be excited about learning R after visiting the website!

~~~
jaywunder
Sarcasm? While it's not a bad website, I wouldn't say it inspires me to get
into stats with R. It doesn't have a code example, or much color. I think the
python homepage is much better designed

~~~
phillc73
Slightly, but I love R and make a sizeable part of my living using that
language. From a design perspective I much prefer websites like R's, rather
than disaster zones like Mashable (although haven't been there for a long
time, so maybe it has changed too).

I don't think people interested in R are necessarily going to judge it first
by its homepage and website.

------
Diederich
Larry Wall is speaking at the San Francisco Perl Mongers meeting this evening.
Along with most of my team at work, my wife and I are going to attend this
event.

The biggest of the three big items remaining in Perl 6 development before GA
has been completed, give or take. (The Great List Refactor) I'm not 100% sure
of the status of the other two, but I think the Unicode stuff is also well on
its way as well.

My prediction is that he will be announcing some kind of Perl 6 1.0 pre-
release this evening.

Given that Perl 5 has been helping me pay my bills for the past 22 years, I'm
more than a little excited!

~~~
untothebreach
Is it usable, performance-wise, in production yet? The company I work for
(also a perl 5 shop) gave MoarVM a try about a year ago with a toy
application, and it was just unusably slow. The task was just receiving some
JSON on a TCP socket, decoding it, and sending a static response, but the
round trip time was large enough that the server that made the request marked
the transaction as 'timed-out' every time. (This is a task that we can do with
perl 5 and still have time left over)

~~~
Diederich
Moar has come light-years over the past 12 months. It very well might be! Give
it another try.

I recall a few months ago that a hand full of the benchmarks on JVM were
actually running faster than Perl 5.latest, though most were slower.

Perl 6 is far, far more optimizable than Perl 5, and also most similar
languages. The long-term focus on correct first is finally paying off.

~~~
untothebreach
Thanks for the info, I will give it another try.

------
wiremine
Nice to see Perl 6 coming along! Even if it doesn't garner the developer base
Perl 5 had back in the 90s, I think Perl 6 is important to push the art of
programming along. Kudos to the Perl 6 team.

\- Would be nice to make the intro copy more informative. Like: why would I
want to use it as a developer? What does it look like compared to my favorite
language?

\- Really like the examples, especially since I haven't done much with Perl 6.
However, like Perl 5, it still looks like parseable line noise to the
untrained eye. Would be nice to have some better explanations to go along with
the code. Maybe not right on the homepage, but at least linked into it.

\- Would like to see the "For Newcomers" links on the "Documentation" page on
the homepage.

------
pvaldes
One of the problems with Perl6 is an excesive proliferation of cute pets and
pet names to learn before to start. A second one is that those names are
unrelated and random, without a clear relationship between them or with what
they can really do.

Fit your tutorial to the desired age of your audience. If something is a
virtual machine just start your tutorial calling it 'our virtual machine'.
Explain briefly what is a virtual machine, instead to say that is a butterfly
with violet wings or something (not everybody knows what to do with this
stuff). If is a compiler, call it compiler and go as quick as possible to the
next step of the tutorial before to lose the interest of your audience. Is not
'how is named' or 'how cute', is 'what can you do with it' and 'how to use it
with the other pieces' what matters.

If you want to use names, at least try to be consistent with the names and
designs. If you want to name something 'rakudo' and want to show your
sensitive side, great, name the other thing 'sazanka' or so. Something nice,
humble, but useful at the same time. Something that can helps you to make a
mental image of the whole picture of this 'paradise' landscape in a couple of
seconds.

~~~
Grim_Reaper
I agree on you.

I read Perl tutorial, its like reading an essay. Not telling you the straight
to the point answer. Perl tutorial really bad.

------
yitchelle
It is optimised for fun.

[http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-6/optimized-for-
fun.html](http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-6/optimized-for-fun.html)

------
the-owlery
The page looks fine. I think the "Fun" and "Whatever" pages could be merged.
The front page should probably explain more why someone would want to use the
language.

That said though, none of this is going to matter unless there's a good
tutorial. Nothing currently available is cutting it as a tutorial.

------
woolfy666
Compliments to the Perl 6 community. Nice new layout and design.

~~~
zoffix222
Thank you!

------
geofft
The parts of this website that everyone is having opinions about (the
spokesbug, the "Fisher Price look and feel", etc.) are not particularly new.
It seems they date to the first version of the Perl 6 home page from 2009:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090901185334/http://perl6.org/](https://web.archive.org/web/20090901185334/http://perl6.org/)

------
estefan
Obviously targetting the preschool market. Get 'em young!

------
colinramsay
This reminds me of when jQuery had a cartoon ninja on their homepage. Am I
seriously looking at a page targeted at grown adults with a talking butterfly
on it?

~~~
motoboi
And yet, everybody loves Go.

~~~
yokohummer7
I believe many others feel differently, but personally, I find the Go mascot a
bit _scary_. Dunno the reason, but it's something that I can't easily get used
when reading the articles on Go.

FWIW, Russ Cox's GitHub icon[1] is similarly scary to me.

[1] [https://github.com/rsc](https://github.com/rsc)

~~~
username223
I've never been a fan of "creepy pervert gerbil" either. I wasn't familiar
with Russ's even creepier rabbit-thing, but now the gerbil makes more sense.

------
ceronman
On of the examples in the main page is how to create a custom postfix operator
using a weird unicode symbol. It doesn't get more perlish than that!

------
debacle
The examples on the homepage kind of underscore how little like Perl Perl 6
actually is.

~~~
nocman
Really? I don't see it that way at all.

I mean, it's not that much different than all the new changes to C++ in the
last 10 years (compared to the C++ from 10 years ago).

Yeah, there are a bunch of new things, but it still looks Perlish to me.

------
__BrianDGLS__
This looks so awful. How can you take the language seriously with a homepage
lke that?

~~~
zoffix222
You don't. You take it in a fun way, the way it's meant to be :) And if you
have any specifics on what looks "so awful", feel free to file an Issue on
github:
[https://github.com/perl6/perl6.org/issues](https://github.com/perl6/perl6.org/issues)

------
mrmondo
Not sure who thought that colour scheme was going to win people over. Wouldn't
it make more sense to have something of a cooler temperature that's more
likely to be easy on the eyes?

~~~
zoffix222
No, because the monotone, cool, corporate colour scheme is not reflective of
the fun and hugtastic Perl 6 community.

------
zoidb
love the logo, hate the mustard yellow on gray.

~~~
cstuder
Then you're probably not going to like the 'Getting Started' page:
[http://perl6.org/getting-started/](http://perl6.org/getting-started/)

(I've opened an issue.)

Update: Fixed now.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
"Because an unreadable language deserves an unreadable website"

(sorry, cheap shot. I like Perl really)

------
Grim_Reaper
Holy Shit! Childish design of Perl 6 site. I think the Perl 6 dev core is not
serious. Perl 6 is an ugly language!

Funny thing about Perl 6 syntax and feature are reinvented the wheel all over
again like Perl 6 'gather' and 'take' syntax, Only Perl 6 have that syntax. A
lot of Reinventing the wheel in syntax and feature make Perl 6 a very bad
language.

~~~
virtualsue
Poor Grim_Reaper. Nothing to do all day but post complaints in a Perl 6
thread. I hope you can find some sort of purpose in life, friend.

------
zoner
So is it just a custom coloured version of Twitter Bootstrap?

~~~
robotnoises
Yes it is: [http://i.imgur.com/sJjJwSa.png](http://i.imgur.com/sJjJwSa.png)

------
assface
This ship sailed 10 years ago. It's too little too late.

The real question is whether python3 can avoid the same fate...

~~~
sigzero
Python 3 is not even in the same boat. Please stop trolling.

