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from the begin-rehash-port-in-3-2-1..... dept.
It's been 15 years in the making. Unveiled in October, Perl 6 has been officially released:
On behalf of the Rakudo[1] development team, I'm proud to announce the Christmas release (December 2015) of Rakudo Perl 6 #94 "коледа"[2]. Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Moar Virtual Machine.
[...] Together, we've built a language that:
- Retains the core values of Perl: expressiveness, getting the job done, taking influences from natural language, and pushing the boundaries of language design
- Has clean, modern syntax, rooted in familiar constructs but revisiting and revising the things that needed it
[...] While we are extremely happy to ship an official Perl 6 release, this is not the end of Rakudo's development. We will continue to ship monthly releases, which will continue to improve performance and our users experience. We'll also continue our work on the specification, with feedback from the community.
Related: Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar
[1] According to Wikipedia:
The name "Rakudo" for the Perl 6 compiler was first suggested by Damian Conway.[7] "Rakudo" is short for "Rakuda-dō" (with a long 'o'; 駱駝道), which is Japanese for "Way of the Camel". "Rakudo" (with a short 'o'; 楽土) also means "paradise" in Japanese.
[2] According to Wikipedia:
Koliada or koleda (Cyrillic: коляда, коледа, колада, коледе) is an ancient pre-Christian winter ritual/festival. It was later incorporated into Christmas.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday December 27 2015, @08:48PM
I'm the biggest Perl supporter anywhere. I've used it since 1991 or whenever I discovered it. I could think in Perl, meaning when presented with a scripting issue, I could mentally visualize the Perl script that solved the issue and just write it. I still use Perl 5 a lot for scripts, particularly with Lib::XML and xpath. But my reaction is that recreating a stable, mature language like Perl 5 that gets the job done and is well understood by generations of programmers just doesn't make any sense. Perl has been taken as far as it can go as a text-processing language. It gets the job done in its niche. The only good thing I've ever seen about Perl 6 is that it gave the people who like change for the sake of change a sandbox to keep them away from people who need to get work done.
There are too many languages in existence with too many different syntaxes to create a split like this in a well-known language. By the time my brain thinks about Python, Perl, javaScript, Groovy, and a million other languages, they're all similar but different. My brain reels as I try to switch from one language to another on an almost daily basis. Now people want me to relearn Perl?
As an exercise, make a list of the different ways to get the length of a string in today's programming languages. You'll quickly see what I mean. I think the proliferation of similar-but-different languages is causing a cognitive drag on computing these days.
BTW here are a few to get you started:
- strlen(str) - C and PHP
- length(str) - Perl's way
- len(str)
- str.len - ie property
- str.len() - ie method
- str.length - ie property
- str.length() - ie method
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @10:06PM
That "length of a string" bit has always amused me, too.
Certain languages that brag about their slavish devotion to object-orientedness somehow get weak in the knees and use len() as a built-in, wieso:
>>> s = 'soylent news'
>>> len(s)
12
That's always struck me as an inconsistencey in Python...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 28 2015, @12:19AM
strlen?! Like CGI.pm, that old C library and the idea of null termination of strings should be long dead, but it just won't stay in its grave. Quit digging it up!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 29 2015, @03:13AM
This is one reason why Lisp is so great: minimal, universal syntax.
"But I have an irrational fear of parentheses!" you say? No problem! It's trivial to write a program that can read in Lisp and output code with your preferred syntax (perhaps you prefer ALGOL/C-like curly brackets? Python significant whitespace? Or brainfuck-style wingdings?), and then takes your preferred syntax and outputs Lisp. It's basically what your language's parser is doing already.
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