
Perl 6.0 released - kamaal
https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2015.12.md
======
brooklyndude
I'm getting really bored with all the JS frameworks. Is it time to get back
into perl?

Cassette tapes are hip again, why not perl. :-)

~~~
desireco42
When you put it like that, it kind of makes sense. BTW, it is vinyl records.
My best friend got obsessed with them, I have to buy them as gifts all the
time.

~~~
elinchrome
No, it's cassettes too. Reel to reel has "better sound" than vinyl for some
people. I'm sure there's some metric or science to back up the argument.

And other enjoy the nostalgia of cassettes and eight tracks. You can hardly
walk down my block without seeing someone listening to a 30 year old walkman.
That's probably more of a style thing.

~~~
Svip
As someone who uses tapes on a regular basis, I have doubts that there is any
metric or science to back up the argument that cassette tapes have 'better
sound' than vinvyl record or digital audio for that matter.

Part of what I enjoy about listening to tapes _is_ in fact its subpar quality.
The main reason I listen to tapes is because my two cars both take cassette
tapes, so it's more a reason to have something to listen to while driving. But
in a car, the small distortions on a tape are easily missed compared to
listening at home. So it works great for me.

(Plus the silence at the end of each side is a great break every 40 minutes or
so.)

~~~
elinchrome
I'm not talking about cassettes, I'm talking about the reel to reels that they
used to use to record masters.

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slmyers
I, for one, was too young for the original Perl craze.

But somehow I had a pocket reference to Perl 5 that my mom put on my desk,
because it was in the house and she assumed it was mine -- I must have picked
it up somewhere and forgot about it.

I'm taking this as a sign to learn Perl 6.

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whatnotests
Congrats to all the people who have worked on this important project over the
years!

I look forward to experimenting with Perl6 soon.

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dsrguru
The bulleted description sounds almost exactly like a description of Ruby, and
I don't mean this sarcastically.

~~~
SwellJoe
Quite a bit of Ruby was borrowed from Perl. It shouldn't be surprising that
they share some characteristics. But, it's silly to say Perl 6 "sounds almost
exactly" like Ruby. There's a huge variety of stuff Perl 6 has that Ruby does
not, at least not as a core part of the language.

~~~
dsrguru
Except that Ruby's translation into English was literally the cause of Perl's
decline.

Perl was intended to be a highly concise shell-like language that excelled at
text processing. Partly in order to achieve such concision, the syntax
overloaded various symbols to mean completely different things in different
syntactic contexts, which made it very difficult for humans to parse quickly
unless they worked in it very frequently (I recall the authors of either the
llama or camel book estimating five times a week as the minimum). As Perl grew
in popularity, objects were added on, and the whole language felt cobbled
together. Perl users mainly used it as a shell replacement or for CGI scripts.
Larger projects tended to be the domain of Python (or Java if concision was no
longer a requirement).

And then came Ruby with syntax that was friendlier to Perl programmers than
Perl itself, yet was semantically consistent, had built-in object support, and
could rival Python for projects of any size, while surpassing it for the
"quick and dirty scripts" that Perl excelled at. The conversation stopped
being about Perl vs. Python and became Ruby vs. Python. People stopped using
Perl 5.

So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if
we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5.

~~~
SwellJoe
_" So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python
if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5."_

On that, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

~~~
dsrguru
Oh, I'm not asserting that it _is_ , just that it sounds like it _might_ be,
based on the description in the Github README. If you're actually familiar
with Perl 6 and don't view that to be true, I'd trust your assessment over my
hypothesis!

~~~
SwellJoe
I'd recommend you take a look. It's certainly got some of the features of Ruby
that had to be bolted on to Perl 5 (objects, for example), but it's still
recognizably Perl, and it has a number of features built-in nicely that feel
bolted-on or just downright ornery in Ruby (Unicode, concurrency, to mention
two big ones). OOP in Perl 6 is beyond anything I've used anywhere else,
except maybe Moose on Perl 5 (which is bolted-on).

I think the most accurate thing to say is that there has been a lot of cross-
pollination between Perl and Ruby, it goes both ways, and it has been going on
for the entire life of Ruby and Perl 6. But, Ruby is Ruby and Perl 6 is
recognizably a Perl variant.

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jcoffland
And it only took a decade of promises. On to Perl 7.

~~~
SwellJoe
Perl 6 was actually more than a decade coming. It was first conceived around
2000. And, Perl 6 is likely to last as long as Perl 5, which is to say, 20+
years (so far, for Perl 5, but it's got at least another 5-10 years in it as a
maintenance language for millions of lines of code in the wild). Though, since
Perl 5 maintained compatibility with Perl 4 and earlier, and continues to do
so today (mostly), one could probably categorize all of Perl <6 as one entity,
and Perl 6 as another language.

And, while we're speaking of promises, I believe that was a feature that came
relatively late in the development of Perl 6, but it is a nice implementation
from what I can tell. Here's the docs:
[http://doc.perl6.org/type/Promise](http://doc.perl6.org/type/Promise)

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eugenekolo2
This is a clickbait and deceptive title. It should read "Rakudo Perl 6.0
Support Added" or at best "Rakudo Perl 6.0 Released".

~~~
kbenson
What? I'm fairly certain you are mistaken on quite a lot of details. Larry
Wall is behind this release, and even though this is one implementation of
Perl 6, that's an intentional difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6. There is
no _one_ implementation, just a set of specs and few projects aiming to
implement those specs. Rakudo is at this time the most mature implementation,
and the specs have been finalized so that a "1.0" version of Perl 6 can be
released with an implementation that works.

~~~
eugenekolo2
I wasn't aware that Perl 6 was going to be projects aiming to implement a
spec. Nonetheless, I find the title to be misleading, it can be phrased better
and more specific. As Larry Wall says in the tweets below, it'd be more exact
to say "A Perl 6 Compiler and Test Suite Released".

