
Perl 6 is fun - kamaal
http://blog.urth.org/2015/11/29/perl-6-is-fun/
======
doktrin
Naive question time. Is Perl 6 something that non-Perl developers should be
looking into?

This may be inflammatory, but it's my earnest impression : as an outsider, I
_really_ don't like how Perl's versioning was handled (5 vs. 6). On top of
being unnecessarily confusing, it also gives an impression of complete
mismanagement - fair or not.

With so many languages out there to choose from, what sets Perl 6 apart from
other modern languages and ecosystems?

~~~
reality_czech
The goal of Perl 6 is to pull together many different things. The clarity of
the original Perl, the ease-of-use of Java, the community size of experimental
languages like Self, the raw performance of Bash scripting, and the safety of
C++. If that's a combination that appeals to you, then go for it.

~~~
jibalt
If intellectual dishonesty appeals to you ... well, you went for it.

------
autarch
See [https://archive.is/UudBe](https://archive.is/UudBe) for a cached version
until my server stops blowing up.

------
xlm1717
I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though
so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release
a lot of people are starting to go back to it and having fun with it again.
And like the author mentions, they improved on a lot of things with perl 6.

~~~
nickysielicki
> Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl.

I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the
majority of their career.

Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or
haskell.

~~~
oldmanjay
Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software
existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined
with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl
scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of
existence.

Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed.

Anyway, that is my little digression.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
>The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the
complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts
spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence.

This is probably the most arrogant statement I've heard on Hacker News as
somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat.

"Obstructionism" is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities
of the hardware by their VMs and containers call "due diligence". As a
sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software
ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other
line of business applications that make the company money. That is what I am
hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks. So a little due
diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs.

The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show "complete lack
of discipline" is also a testament to the "ooh, shiny!" mentality of many
engineers. We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you
scribbling out report files? We have an automated system for dealing with
system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-
standard way? Remember, by the time I see your code it's too late - it's
already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or
changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your
complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running.

Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about "obstruction" and
"inconsistency". I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should
spend some time looking in the mirror.

------
autarch
Author here. I appreciate the traffic but my server doesn't. I'm working on
getting this viewable again.

~~~
landr0id
Want to put an archive.is link up to lighten the load?

~~~
autarch
[https://archive.is/UudBe](https://archive.is/UudBe)

------
giancarlostoro
One question I haven't seen asked in this particular thread is, can it be used
in production? What type of ecosystem is available (something like CPAN) for
Perl 6 and how reliable is it? Two questions I suppose, but I guess the first
one is more important.

Edit:

What I really mean by "can it be used in production" is really: is anyone
using it in production and what is their experience with it and their
recommendations?

~~~
justinator
I think we're all waiting with baited breath for Perl 6.Stable to be released.
Hopefully that'll be around Perl 6.Christmas.

For now, it's fun to see what the future will bring. I'm excited.

~~~
jjn1056
I'm totally not waiting. This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production
ready' It wasn't all those years ago, and won't be in Jan 2016 either. No
jobs, no deep libraries, no SDK support... The list is unending. If we'd put
1/10 the time into minor improvements to perl5 over the past 15 years we'd
have most of what people seem to like about Perl6 in a language you can
actually get a job. Instead we have two languages with no future instead of
one...

~~~
justinator
> This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready'

I'm curious, what exactly are you talking about?

~~~
cygx
Likely 'Rakudo Star', which was advertized as a a _useful, usable, "early
adopter" distribution of Perl 6_ back in 2010 (and has had regular releases
ever since[1]).

[1] [http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/](http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/)

~~~
justinator
Yeah, that was my thinking, too - but no one was under the impression that
Rakudo Star was anything but a sneak preview of Perl 6 - something to fiddle
around with, and go, "oh hey, neat!", and not to launch a business on. It
answered the question, "just what exactly are you up to?"

Here's how it was described in 2010:

 _Rakudo Star is aimed at “early adopters” of Perl 6. We know that it still
has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some
advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren’t implemented
yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and
fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These
“Star” releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to
programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback
about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo’s implementation of it._
[http://rakudo.org/2010/10/28/rakudo-
star-2010-10-released/](http://rakudo.org/2010/10/28/rakudo-
star-2010-10-released/)

In 2015, it's described as being in, "beta".
[http://rakudo.org/2015/11/28/announce-rakudo-star-
release-20...](http://rakudo.org/2015/11/28/announce-rakudo-star-
release-2015-11-now-in-beta/)

Although the gp doesn't post much, they are obviously a busy, respected, and
influential member of the Perl community. I'm confused why they are so doom
and gloom over this amazing new language (Perl 6) that is nearly a stable
release.

~~~
cygx
_I 'm confused why they are so doom and gloom over this amazing new language
(Perl 6) that is nearly a stable release._

Cf various rants by chromatic, eg
[http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/02/goodnight-
parrot.h...](http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/02/goodnight-parrot.html)

~~~
kbenson
chromatic is hardly unbiased in that respect. He has some good points, he's an
insightful person and a good communicator, but IIRC he's admitted that he
might be at least _somewhat_ biased in his opinions to me here on HN in the
past due to his history with Parrot and the past Perl 6/Parrot issues (which
is to be expected. I would doubt anyone who claimed to be unbiased with his
history).

That said, his recent comments on HN regarding this issue seem to only half
the time making a cogent argument, and the other half the time being pithy
snipes, and at this point I'm not sure he's not working with vastly outdated
information.

~~~
chromatic
Are you thinking of this thread?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982742)

(I find particular amusement in rereading Moritz's post in that thread.)

 _I would doubt anyone who claimed to be unbiased with his history_

It's certainly possible that a mysterious GitHub error revoked my commit
access late one night, but the timing seems suspicious. I'll own up to my
mistakes, but the rewriting of history seems unfair.

~~~
kbenson
> Are you thinking of this thread?

With regard to you admitting bias? I don't recall specifically, we discussed
it in depth a few times, so it could very well have been a feeling I left with
and not a specific statement (and I'll fully admit I might have been
projecting).

> I would doubt anyone who claimed to be unbiased with his history

What I meant was that was that anyone who has a complicated past where they
feel misrepresented and that they were treated unfairly is bound to be biased
in some way, and to claim otherwise would show a lack of introspection. It
wasn't meant to be insulting, or something I thought you should feel the need
to defend, it's more a general worldview of mine. Bias is hard to overcome and
harder to eliminate. There's plenty of things I would like to think I'm
unbiased about, but in reality I'm probably not.

I'm getting a strong feeling of Deja Vu. I think we may have had this
discussion or one like it previously.

------
atrust
I loved Perl 5. Now when Perl 6 is out, I'm a bit confused about versioning.
As far as I understand, perl 6 files are of .pl6 extension. Why would that be
different from regular .pl, giving that it's just a new version of a language?
I mean, I have never seen things like .js5, .php6, etc. Next, is `use v6;`
mandatory? Quite confusing. Am I allowed to do `use v2;`?

~~~
grondilu
The extension is not mandatory. Usually people use .p6, but you can also use
.pl . Notice that I've never seen .pl6.

'use v6;' is not mandatory either, but it allows your program to display an
helpful error message if you try to run it with the perl 5 interpreter. Try
"perl -e 'use v6;'", you should get:

    
    
        Perl v6.0.0 required--this is only v5.20.2, stopped at -e line 1.
        BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.
    

'use v2;' will not run with the Perl 6 interpreter, but 'use v5;' will work,
as the Perl 6 interpreter is specced to be able to run Perl 5, albeit with
certain limitations (no XS, for instance).

~~~
cygx
_Notice that I 've never seen .pl6_

Check your Rakudo's _tools_ folder.

------
_pmf_
(I just asked on stackoverflow, but I'l try here again:)

Given that Rakudo VM is JVM based, I expected that there's some
interoperability layer for the host JVM, but could not find anything.

Does someone know whether this is possible?

~~~
kbenson
Rakudo isn't JVM "based", but the JVM is _one_ VM that it targets (also
MoarVM, and Parrot. I imagine at some point the .Net CLR will be added). That
said, take a look at this[1].

1:
[https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-p...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/day-03-rakudo-
perl-6-on-the-jvm/)

~~~
dragonwriter
There _was_ Parrot support, but AFAIK its been dead since February.

~~~
kbenson
Fair enough. I struggled with how to denote my uncertainty with Parrot's
status without implying it was deprecated if it wasn't, so I settled with just
including it without any qualifiers.

------
wodenokoto
How is Perl6 overcoming the problems that python3 is facing in moving people
over from one version to the next?

~~~
MadcapJake
The situation is really quite different. Perl 6 is a sister language, Perl 5
is still quite actively being developed, and the wait has certainly made many
hesitant to begin upgrading. One thing to keep in mind is that Python 2 is
just now finally starting to wane, so I am guessing that if Perl 5 does end up
going the way of Python 2, it won't be for quite some time.

------
unixhero
Am I the only one to have noticed?

PERL is a shuffling of REPL

~~~
justinator
This is a bit pedantic, but you wouldn't write about Perl in all caps, as it's
not actually an acronym (but it is a backronym)

[http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-
differenc...](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What%27s-the-difference-
between-%22perl%22-and-%22Perl%22%3F)

Welcome to the Perl subculture!

~~~
unixhero
Not pedantic enough. You didn't comment on Perl being a backronym for REPL! I
can't find anything out there about this either. It must therefore only be me
:).

>Welcome to the Perl subculture! I was at the time also in the Slackware
subculture, Church of the subgenious. It got very foobar.

Tried learning Perl since highschool, it was too much of a mindF* for me to
get going with. chomp? regex! Phew.

Maybe with Perl6, it's time.

------
pearjuice
>Perl

>fun

Pick one and choose wisely.

