

Ask HN: Perl 6 looks interesting. But what's the current status? - irahul

Last night I read the open source perl6 book and played some with it. It definitely looks different and more expressive compared to the languages in the same league - perl5, python and ruby.<p>Changes to regex and rules &#38; tokens make pattern matching pleasant. Grammars bring formal parsing to mainstream. The perl6 OOP way looks promising.<p>But on the other hand, the status page doesn't say anything meaningful - http://dev.perl.org/perl6/status.html. The wiki shows timelines only till 2007 - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?when_will_perl_6_be_released<p>I can't find any information about using existing cpan modules with Perl6 or a replacement; I did stumble upon a mailing thread about perl5to6 conversion tool or something.<p>So, overall, what's the time-frame we are looking at when perl6 can safely be used for a new project? It looks like north of 2 years to me.
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chromatic
What kind of project do you have in mind?

One of my client projects needs an object serialization and indexing
mechanism, a (stronger) HTTP library, a file-based cache, and a wrappers for a
couple of POSIX functions for me to port it from Perl 5 to Perl 6. As it's a
project for a client, the opportunity cost for writing those libraries
themselves has been too high to justify porting to Perl 6.

~~~
irahul
But won't these concerns arise in almost all of the projects? The lack of
libraries? It rules out doing web based projects - no framework(I don't think
catalyst for perl6 is there yet), no supporting libraries(esoteric orm,
multiple db backends, playing well with other components viz. 0mq, gearman,
memcache etc).

I think Perl 6 in the current incarnation is only suited for some algorithmic,
stand-alone mini-projects which are basically raw code and don't depend on
external components.

What's the plan for cpan for Perl 6? cpan6.org is dead. Google is at loss of
words when asked about it. I found only 2 relevant results - 1 was about
should perl 6 use cpan and other was a stack overflow thread. I found this
modules page - <http://modules.perl6.org/>, but the coverage is severely
limiting.

I wanted to put perl 6 in practice but looks like it isn't happening in the
coming 2 years. I can work on mathematical/algorithmic problems, but then most
of the algorithmic problems I need to solve need to be integrated in
production code and hence, I would rather solve it in python(or whatever the
codebase is) rather than playing with perl 6.

As of now, the cons outnumber the pros, but for sure, perl6 is going to have
an interesting future.

~~~
chromatic
_I wanted to put perl 6 in practice but looks like it isn't happening in the
coming 2 years._

I don't see the connection between "Perl 6 doesn't have every module Perl 5
has right now" and "I can't use this for two years". Perl _5_ doesn't have
every library I need (and certainly didn't when I started using it 12 years
ago).

Now you can use _some_ Perl 5 modules from Rakudo right now, and people are
writing more Perl 6 modules (and Perl 6 has as core language features many of
the modules used in modern Perl 5). The question is what you need for any
specific project.

