The Perl 6 project 10 years old today

[jamespitts]

There's nothing wrong with taking 10 years to create something new. Since they began, I've taken serious ganders into java and ruby. Now that I'm back in the perl camp I find that I know a lot more about programming in other cultures. And now that the community is just about done, I can apply what I've learned using a "language" unprecedented in flexibility and capability.

[loewenskind]

> I can apply what I've learned using a "language" unprecedented in flexibility and capability.

This right here is what I've always hated about the perl community. It's so rare to find a perl user who can mention the language without spouting these kind of exaggerations and untruths.

Of course you could always prove me wrong by demonstrated how perl is "flexible" and "capable" in a manner that is unprecedented [1].

[1] un·prec·e·dent·ed

    adjective

    without previous instance; never before known or
    experienced; unexampled or unparalleled: an
    unprecedented event.

[masak]

One post like yours, sir, makes it worth trawling through a hundred posts by churlish detractors. Thank you.

[sreque]

Puts on Perl troll hat

You must not have learned too much, or else you'd have no reason to go back! :)

[jbellis]

"I count 33 synoptic documents at perlcabal.org. Synopses 2 through 6 tend to be fairly stable, although changes still occur. The remainder of the synopses are still drafts for the most part, awaiting more feedback from implementations and language use."

This is why when people like chromatic invariably comment in a "still waiting for perl 6 thread" that "you can write perl 6 now!!11!" I roll my eyes. (Quietly. So they'll go away.)

[ekiru]

I'm not sure how much Perl 6 chromatic writes on a daily basis (I'm mostly only familiar with his work on his book and the Perl 6 book and his magical ability to constantly find another 2-6% performance improvement for Parrot), but there are quite a few people writing Perl 6 already.

Obviously there are people working on Rakudo and other Perl 6 implementations that spend their time writing Perl 6. But there's also people writing wikis, NES emulators, testing tools, build systems, and many other things in Perl 6. When people like chromatic say that you can write Perl 6 now, they aren't speaking based on hypotheticals or beliefs; they're speaking from experience. And, in my personal opinion, despite the NYI status of some things, bugs in the implementations of other things, and slow performance, writing code for Perl 6 is an amazing and wonderful experience. No, I wouldn't rewrite mission-critical systems on which people's lives depend in Perl 6 yet. Yes, I might write systems on which my life and future depend in Perl 6 right now. I definitely would and do write my side projects and one-off scripts in Perl 6 right now.

[chromatic]

This is why when people like chromatic invariably comment in a "still waiting for perl 6 thread" that "you can write perl 6 now!!11!" I roll my eyes.

Almost five years ago now I ported a piece of Perl 5 code used millions of times a day to Perl 6. Where is the hyperbole in my statements?

[mst]

People can, and are doing. Much though I'm a happy perl5 programmer, I often use bleeding edge libraries in my implementations when I'm sure that's the best approach (and if it's code for a client after careful consultation with them). People I know doing rails work often use stuff they know may change under them because it lets them ship faster now and they consider it an acceptable trade-off of risks - and the gems they're using generally don't have a spec document at all.

There are risks involved in every technology choice made for every program. If I didn't actively prefer perl5's semantics and community philosophy in a number of places, I'd be seriously evaluating perl6 for use in code where I could guarantee deployment to be pinned against a particular runtime version, just like I -do- use API-unstable perl5 libraries where I can guarantee deployment against a particular library version and the benefits in terms of delivery time outweigh the risks.

[perlgeek]

That's not what I call "quietly", fwiw.

[mkramlich]

10 years is also about how long ago I abandoned Perl

[trainwreckin]

10 years too early, I'd say. You're missing out on the fun stuff.

[wazoox]

Too bad, it got much better in the meanwhile (particularly in the last few years).

[philwelch]

One promising thing about Perl 6 was the way it tried to bring parsers to everyday programming the way Perl popularized regular expressions. I'm sad the language seems to have stalled for that reason.

[ekiru]

You're almost exactly right there. One promising thing about Perl 6 is the way it brings parsers to everyday programming the way previous Perls popularized regexes. :)

Perl 6's approach to syntax, operators, grammars, language extension, etc. is like Common Lisp's reader macros; except that Perl 6 makes them easy and composable. Common Lisp libraries tend to use reader macros very sparingly because it's hard to make them play together nicely. Perl 6 makes it easy to alter the syntax in ways that play together nicely. Many of Rakudo's core operators are defined in normal Perl 6 code. It's trivial to make new ones of your own. The more extensive grammar modifications aren't quite there yet, I think, but it'll happen, and it will be revolutionary.

Fortunately, it hasn't stalled. It's moving along quite well.

[perlgeek]

I'm curious, how did you get that impression?

I'm one of the Perl 6 developers, and IMHO the regexes and grammars are one of the "killer" features. And I've also seen them evolve gradually, and have used them for various purposes.

What gave you the impression that it has stalled? Is that the general impression on the outside of the Perl 6 community? What kind of marketing could we do to reach you?

[rbanffy]

The first production-ready release will be on GNU Hurd, right? ;-)

[sambeau]

I'd like to mention Dan Sugalski who, before Audrey, was a similar whirlwind for the Parrot project. He too was sadly burnt out long before his time.

I highly recommend perusing his well written blogs that wonderfully explain difficult programming topics.

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/

[sambeau]

His "What the heck is" and "What the heck was I thinking?" are particularly good.

[zokier]

After reading that, it seems like Perl has rather nice community. If Python has engineers and Ruby rockstars, then I'd say that Perl has hackers.

[sjs]

> Python has engineers and Ruby rockstars

This meaningless statement really bugs me. People who write Python and Ruby aren't rockstar engineers. They're just programmers/developers/[whatever you like to call them].

People who speak English are simply English speakers. Nothing more can, nor should, be inferred from that fact.

[mst]

Gross generalisation though any such attempt at a single word summary is, I'd say that's nonetheless pretty true at least from the Perl side of things - the 21st century landscape of both the perl5 and perl6 communities is very much about people who consider themselves "Just Another Perl Hacker" - in that while we might be proud of our achievements, there's very little arrogance about our code itself. Of course the lack of "wow hey this is awesome look at me" is one of the key things leading us to need to learn more marketing as a community, but I'll take quiet pragmatism over loud arrogance any day as the primary mindset of the authors of the things I'm depending on in production.

[davidw]

I kind of toyed around with adding a little addition to langpop.com looking at the 'rockstar ratio': overall popularity compared to "rock star" sitings in the job ads. Never got around to it though...

[openfly]

It's a spring chicken compared to Enlightenment.

[ww520]

Didn't someone say it take 10 years to develop great software?

[neilk]

You're probably thinking of Joel Spolsky's "It Takes Ten Years To Develop Great Software. Get Used To It".

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html

However, Joel explicitly states this means you release early, and iterate.

[adbge]

I think you're referring to the belief that it takes 10,000 hours of practice in order to "become a world class expert in anything." This "10,000 hour rule" was made famous by the book Outliers and is primarily based on the research of K. Anders Ericsson. 10,000 hours of practice is often equated to 10 years, though I'm not sure if the book explicitly makes this parallel.

[nicpottier]

Perl 6 is the Duke Nukem of the programming world.