After 15 years of development, perl 6 will be officially launched as production ready software in 2015.
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/get_ready_to_party/
Who knows, 2015 may also be the year of the linux desktop, unless HURD is also ready for prime time.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Saturday November 08 2014, @09:19AM
Yeah, sure it will. Considering that Perl 6 currently rivals Duke Nukem Forever for time spent in development hell, I'll believe it when I see it.
Maybe they should just wait another year so they can say they beat DNF for development time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Saturday November 08 2014, @09:41AM
Having said that, I'm not even going to upgrade to 5.14 or beyond, as they broke perl 5 a few years back, and, worse than that, are determined to make it worse with each subsequent minor version.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday November 08 2014, @12:13PM
It's further away from Perl than C++ is from C. It's yet another absolutely unnecessary scripting language. It brings absolutely nothing interesting to the table. It brings unwanted and unnecessary changes with *bogus* justifications to the table, from what I can see.
I haven't kept up, but I do recall that it brought one interesting thing to the table: a formal specification. It's something I wish had been done with Perl 5 retroactively. Everyone seemed to be content with having the perl code be a sort of reference implementation with no formal spec, and that's a damn shame. It might not seem like a big deal, but having a formal spec means being able to re-implement the language in a reliable way. It's done a lot of good for other languages, like Python, which has alternate implementations like Jython (Python compiled to JVM bytecode) or Pyston (Python compiler using LLVM). There's even an implementation that compiles Python to Javascript!
I still enjoy Perl 5 and find it more natural to use than most languages, so I would have loved seeing similar kinds of implementations for it so I could use it in places where it's not currently a good fit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 10 2014, @10:17AM
And Facebook has been making faster versions of PHP. So I don't think speeding up perl is impossible. Unlikely of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @06:15PM
In racing, DNF means "did not finish". How appropriate!
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday November 08 2014, @11:36AM
I've thought for a decade or more that Perl 6 was the best thing that ever happened to Perl. While all the designers and change-for-the-sake-of-change people worked on Perl 6 as the be-all and end-all of language design, and it became a black hole, everyone else used Perl 5 to get productive work done. Perl 5 was immune from huge changes (especially the kind that would break existing code), and stayed stable. This allowed CPAN to be one of the greatest code-reuse repositories ever, because once someone wrote something, it kept working.
Perl 5 has outlasted every fad and has been dumped on for decades, but people just ignore all that and keep doing productive work with it! I imagine Perl 5 will outlast Perl 6, too.
Full disclosure: I've used Perl since mumble mumble - wow, I'm getting old. I'm in my third decade with the language.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @02:34PM
You've tried to make Perl 5's stagnation sound like a good thing. It isn't a good thing at all. Python, and even Ruby, have eaten Perl's lunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @07:33PM
yeah, and node.js tosses [urbandictionary.com] perl's salad!
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 08 2014, @07:31PM
CPAN is hardly immune to breakage. Several times I've had to roll back to old versions of CPAN modules to keep Perl programs functioning. The individuals who maintain modules on CPAN don't test their changes that carefully or thoroughly.
I've been looking forward to Perl 6. One of the coolest things about it may make much of CPAN unnecessary. Lot of CPAN modules are wrapper code for C libraries. Perl 6 is supposed to be a lot better at hooking directly into libraries.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday November 09 2014, @02:25AM
But CPAN will probably still be around, because, quite frankly, it was the one good thing Perl had going for it.
Put in a module to CPAN and its available everywhere. You could lock it down to specific versions of modules so some careless developer didn't break all of your stuff. You could also esily make your own local version so that something under active development didn't bite you. And of course you never had to run CPAN at all if you didn't want to.
But I never had any significant problem. It happened so infrequently, (three times that I recall) that it was never a big deal. Besides it was occasionally entertaining to see all the bitch-mail that could get generated.
I remember the early days of Spamassassin when it was totally written in Perl.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 10 2014, @05:24PM
This should be modded 7 for sublime. You sir are a genius.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 08 2014, @12:21PM
Hey, paulej72, let's to a full rewrite of site code in perl 6 next year. *hides*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 08 2014, @01:29PM
Everyone has their druthers. This sort of discussion has played out so many times over the years that its features are utterly predictable (including the inevitable +5 Funny comment from somebody about assembly-now-get-off-my-lawn-you-kids!). But for me, this is great news because I love perl. It makes me smile. Its arcane syntax reaches me on a visceral level the way I'm sure alchemy did its practitioners. Its resilience and power in the face of time and trends delight me. I have used so many other languages in the past but it is the only one I have an emotional connection to, and I can't exactly explain why, because it certainly wasn't my first or second or even third. But this puts spring in my step for 2015.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday November 08 2014, @02:09PM
This is what has happened to many open source projects after they've effectively finished their original product.
"What shall we do now?"
"I know, let's be everything to everybody!"
A few years ago (was it a decade?) I saw a post on a Perl 6 discussion group that if they made it abstract enough they could just switch out one syntax grammar for another and then, why "Perl could even interpret JavaScript!"
I understand why Microsoft makes pointless changes every couple years -- they've run out of suckers to pay for something that is essentially free to produce after the first copy, so now they need those same suckers to pay again. But open source devs: you don't have to copy everything Microsoft does. There should come a point where your software is done, except maybe for bug fixes and future interoperability issues. So just stop already. Software doesn't need to be an endlessly moving target. You're not going to finally get a girl if you just change the font or the background color one more time!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @02:46PM
There are people around who still care about what Larry Wall says?!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @03:12PM
Er, Python 2, of course.
(Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 08 2014, @03:25PM
Back in the late 90's I ran a small internal network (less than 20 computers) for students to enter and crunch numbers. Each machine had a bare-bones Slackware install on some old Pentiums (II?), applications were written in Perl, and Perl scripts held it all together. The simplicity of it all was elegant, and I loved it.
Then enter the Slack and Perl communities. It was a 90/10 rule. 90% were decent and a pleasure to interact with online, and 10% were passive-agressive sociopaths. The 10% seemed to rule the roost, so to speak. In a few years I replaced Slack with FreeBSD, and traded the Pentiums for more powerful machines allowing me to replace the Perl applications with Java. What a difference. Most if not all of my memories of the Perl (and Slack) forums are unpleasant, in sharp contrast to the many wonderful exchanges I've had with the FreeBSD and Java communities.
There's more to the story than what's usually mentioned as to why Perl (and Slackware) began to dry up and blow away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @03:49PM
I'm missing something. What does the server host OS and the programming language used by site scripts have to do with the behavior of the online users?
(Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:54PM
What I was getting at, maybe poorly, is that the online forums can influence users to find a more palatable alternative, and can discourage new comers. As the user-base shrinks, the project (OS, language, or whatever) moves toward irrelevance.
BTW, it wasn't just the online communities. The behavior was exhibited elsewhere. There was a quite unfortunate arrogance of the few that worked against the interest of the many.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:05PM
If there were sociopaths among the developers, they were most likely among the 90%. That's exactly why sociopaths are so dangerous: They are not easily recognized as such. They appear to be very friendly and helpful people (and actively maintain that impression), while harming you behind your back. When you find out they work against you, you can bet it's already too late: The damage is already done.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:13PM
Perl 6 relies on Haskell no?
Why not just learn Haskell?
It seems to be influenced by Javascript, so no I won't use the same logic.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:40PM
No. One of the implementations of Perl 6 is written in Haskell, just like Perl 5 is written in C. That's the only relation between Perl 6 and Haskell.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @07:38PM
haskell is written in C. Why not just learn C? The first C compiler was in PDP assembler. Why not just learn PDP assembler? Fuck it, why not just use punch cards? Why not just use 8 toggles on the front of the computer to enter octal values?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09 2014, @02:33PM
haha that is a great response.
Now excuse me while I design my own processor to make my program more efficient!
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday November 08 2014, @06:19PM
I used to be pretty good at perl, and wrote some pretty awesome (if I do say so myself) scripts using it. But while I had huge respect for it, I can't say I ever liked it. Even after a year I had the camel book within arms reach, and when I had to work on a co-workers script I spent too much time figuring out what it was doing and how it was doing it.
There's a reason it's called executable line noise.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @07:40PM
The perl motto is TMTOWTDI - There's More Than One Way To Do It. For example, use python. Or use ruby. Or use java. I guess if you're really desperate, you could even use perl.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @10:47PM
Remember, it's pronounced like "Tim Toady".