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perl6 and Parrot 0.5.2 Released
Posted by
Zonk
on Monday January 21, @12:34AM
from the for-camels-with-time-on-their-hands dept.
from the for-camels-with-time-on-their-hands dept.
mAriuZ writes "Bob Rogers just released Parrot 0.5.2. This monthly release includes a couple of interesting new features. First, we've bundled Patrick Michaud's Rakudo (thats the implementation of Perl 6 on Parrot) such that you can type make perl6 on Unixy platforms and make perl6.exe on Windows and get a working standalone Perl 6 binary. This is experimental and we hope to iron out some installation and deployment issues by next months release, but it was important to demonstrate our progress. The second new feature is a toolkit for starting your own compiler. Max Mohun built a prototype several months ago, and we've added a stripped-down version for now that builds the skeleton of a compiler for you using the Parrot Compiler Tools. I mentioned the LOLCODE compiler in What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on Their Christmas Vacation; this is how Simon and Company were able to get LOLCODE up and running so quickly."
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LOLWUT (Score:5, Funny)
can has stdio?
visible "frist p0st!!"
kthxbye
btw damn you lameness filter!
Re:LOLWUT (Score:5, Informative)
Offtopic? That is an example of LOLCODE [lolcode.com], and the article does note that there's an implementation of LOLCODE atop Parrot [lolcode.com].
Re:LOLWUT (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, the first is an example of LOLCODE and is modded Offtopic and the second mentions that and it's modded Troll. Seriously, WHAT.THE.FUCK?
Merry Christmas! (Score:3, Funny)
Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am relieved that Perl 6 is finally showing signs of life, I have concerns:
1. Can Perl 6 take the place of Perl 5?
Perl 5 is integral to Unix/Linux systems; it is pretty much taken for granted. To switch to Perl 6 seems like a monumental task. It seems more likely that those wishing to use Perl 6 will have it installed along with Perl 5 (not instead of).
2. Did it take too long?
Perl 6 received a fair amount of hype when the project began. With no realistic timetable publicly announced, it seems that people forgot or gave up on it. In fact, in that time Python has become very popular; I wonder if it has taken some of the 'market share' that would have otherwise gone to Perl 6.
3. Is it any good?
Perl 6 was supposed to be the "community's" rewrite of Perl 5. The word 'community', when it comes to programming language design, is a bit concerning.... It almost sounds like a euphemism for 'committee'. And that makes me shudder. I once heard the expression "A camel is a horse designed by committee." And I can think of a few programming languages that go along with that saying (No offense to camels).
Either way, I will download it. I will use it. I will see if it's any good. And, despite all of the issues, I am glad it's finally here!
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Interesting)
2. It took far too long. They had books out about Perl6 after the announcement, consisting of reprints of whitepapers and proposals.. Years later, still no perl 6 for real.
3. Nobody will care how awesome Perl 6 is. The audience of Perl 6/5 doesn't care about single binding vs multiple binding objects -- they won't even get out of bed to have an argument about strongly typed languages vs. weakly typed languages. They just like easy programming -- the metric of Perl 6's success is how much it caters to lazy people. If you want glue, use perl, if you want cement you use something stronger.
(I was a Perl guy for 15 years, used to love it, now Perl and Ruby both look like line noise that's been encrypted -- compared to my new girlfriend, Python.)
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In those six years, my former company built and twice re-engineered a forex trading platform written in Java. We went from four machines to over hundred. This is on a shoestring budget with less tha
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:4, Informative)
A shoestring budget with one full-time developer is still more than Perl 6 and Parrot have had.
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Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:4, Interesting)
However, it's also true that Perl 6 has been designed to cater to both crowds, and that's one of the myriad reasons it took so long. Is just as short and sweet as it always was in Perl 5, but if you want to get under that hood, you can.
Perl 5 is a toy language (it's arguable that CPAN is Perl 5's most valuable feature, and that without it, Perl would not have a community today). It's a great little toy, and powerful in its own right, but it's a toy. Line noise? Eh, perhaps, but I started as a C programmer, and thus was trained early in how to write code in an unmaintainable syntax in a maintainable way. The largest problem is that Perl is far easier to be effective in than C, and that breeds long-standing unmaintainable code on its own. That problem is, unfortunately, the curse of all easy languages to use (PHP and Python suffer equally there, though Python has been somewhat stricter on not allowing the bad code to become community code). Perl 6, on the other hand is not a toy, and I'll use it for very different reasons.
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Funny)
I've been a fan of Perl ever since the 3.x era. A couple years ago I got a job at a place where the scripting language of choice is Python. My take on it is that Python is that cute, quirky goth chick you met at the bar. She's fun for a while, but once you get to know her you realize that she's got some pretty deep emotional issues that drive you absolutely nuts. And she's really, really obsessive about her appearance.
No, I'm more than happy to stick with Perl. She may be a little older and not quite as attractive, but she has a wonderful personality. Plus, there's more than one way to do her.
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:4, Insightful)
PERL6, like those before it, is just a tool. It will either work or not. Some don't like PERL because it can be messy and perhaps unstructured. I submit to you that some coders can make a mess of any language. PERL has its advantages, and like everything else, its disadvantages.
I too will use PERL6, no matter what name it is given. I find PERL is quite useful, and I presume that many others do also as it still seems to be relevant to all but the prophets of the latest Web2.0 gizzmo language thingies.
In any case, a hammer is a hammer, and when you have to drive some nails... well, damnit, use a hammer.
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Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Funny)
That's good; that name will likely be "Perl 6".
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Informative)
Not "Community". More like Larry's Magnum Opus. (Score:5, Interesting)
Dont get me wrong, I loved reading the Apocalypses. I thought, "wow, Larry really has a deep vision of where he wants things to go". I thought is was pretty neat and hoped to play with it. But in my mind I was thinking that Perl 6 would keep to the general strengths of Perl, in that it was FAST to get done what you wanted.
That was YEARS ago. I'm abstractly interested but have no desire to use Perl anymore. The "community" rewrite was sprinkled with requests that addressed what people were actually trying to do (certainly NOT trying to parse Perl, NOT taking 6 years, and NOT trying to get a VM running), they were a hodgepodge but every submission was pretty much focused on a narrow problem and in themselves would be achievable in less than 6 years. Instead it's become Larry's Odyssey. I also no longer harbor any expectation that Perl 6 will be FAST (to learn incrementally, to develop a quick solution, or to execute). Great if it does, I just don't believe or care.
I wish Perl 6 had been the 'shortsighted' approval of perhaps a quarter or a third of the RFCs, rolled out within a year or two. Maybe Perl 7 could have continued this stupid trajectory it's on to irrelevance. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features.
This wasn't what it should have been. It is like this because Perl 6 was overrun by Larry's priorities instead of the community's.
Re:Not "Community". More like Larry's Magnum Opus. (Score:5, Interesting)
Want a few examples of improvements? The regex parser recently went from mostly recursive to mostly iterative. it also has many new features and has other efficiency gains. Unicode handling exists and continues to get better. Several things take less memory than previously. Lexically-scoped pragmas can now be implemented in pure Perl without resorting to C. A simpler and clearer way to handle static lexical variables has been introduced. Perl's default variable can now be lexically scoped. Many new language features have been introduced. Perl has a switch statement in the core now. There's a new defined-or operator. The user-defined sorting subs can now be recursive if you need them to be. Compress::Zlib, Archive::Tar, and Archive::Extract are among some exciting new core modules.
Most of what I just mentioned were changes between 5.8.8 and 5.10.0, so there's quite a bit more between 5.6.1 and the current Perl landscape. There were also a lot of changes to Perl 5 back in the 2001 to 2002 time frame, and have been all along since.
Some changes between 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 included changing to a stable algorithm for sort(), changing the default IO layer from the system stdio to the PerlIO system for more predictable cross-platform behavior, safe signal handling, the UTF8 encoding being changed from lexically scoped with the program to being associated with a file handle, and a much better threading model.
Important changes during the 5.8.x series include extra randomness in the order of hash keys, Config.pm being shrunk by about 90%, better handling of UTF-16 encoding, the elimination of some temporary lists during certain operations, and smarter malloc() handling.
Perl 5 isn't exactly sitting still, and it hasn't been. Perl 6 is, IMHO, not so much a simple upgrade of Perl as a new language in the family of Perl-like languages. Perl 6 will be to Perl 5 much what Perl 5 was to Perl 4. People will notice some syntax changes, but many people will program in it like they were using the previous version with a tweaked syntax. Others will take advantage of all the new features. Eventually most Perl programmers will find a portion of the language that suits their tasks most readily and will become most comfortable with that. Perl 5 isn't going away for a long time, so people who really can't stand the idea of a new Perl will be able to do a lot of Perl 5 work.
Yeah, there are other languages that will wax and wane. Ruby looks interesting, and a lot of people seem to like it. I have a general distaste for personally using languages with so much significant whitespace as Python, but lots of people really like it and there's really good software being written in it. I can't fault a language or its designer for my having other preferences. JavaScript is pretty handy, and it's getting better tools and implementations all the time and a new standard soonish. I've picked up HaXe recently, and it's an interesting alternative to ActionScript and JavaScript. I am considering learning D. Java's really popular. Yet many people still program in Perl, C++, C, Ada, Pascal derivatives, Basic, Fortran, and even COBOL. People said Basic was dead, but Visual Basic is still around.
Like Perl, though, what we call Basic these days doesn't much resemble Basic from 20 years ago. Visual Basic doesn't even look like older versions of itself, let alone QuickBasic or the even older and even more severely limited GWBasic or Dartmouth Basic. If Perl 6 is a few years separated and a bit different, it doesn't mean it's not Perl or that it was a waste to create it. The only way it would be a waste is if nobody used it.
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s/8\.10/10.0/;
Re:Perl 5 to Perl 6 (Score:5, Insightful)
> Perl 6 received a fair amount of hype when the project began. With no realistic timetable
> publicly announced, it seems that people forgot or gave up on it. In fact, in that time
> Python has become very popular; I wonder if it has taken some of the 'market share' that
> would have otherwise gone to Perl 6.
I tend to think Perl 6 as a completely new language, rather than a new version of an old language. If you have even the concatenation operation changed from "." to "_", and if array indexing that you had written as "$arr[$i]$" now must look like "@arr[$i]" instead, and if you'd lose RAII on the way because garbage collection is now no longer at predictable time, it mean all programs will have to be significantly modified or at least converted. This is not exactly what I'd expect from a new version.
As a new language, it emerge probably slower than what most of us hope, but is probably not as slow as most of us perceived. After all, Perl 6 is a very ambitious language that have all features of Perl 5 and quite a bit more, and it has a completely new low-level engine as well. That slowness is probably due to the lack of any people dedicated to its implementation until very recently.
By the way, Python is not new. The first version of Python is released in approximately the same time as the first version of Perl. Python is first conceived in the 80's, first implementation started being written late 1989, completed 1991, and did not gain general acceptance until 2000. FYI, Perl 6 is conceived in 2000, Pugs starts to be implemented in early 2005, although it is still quite rudimentary.
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Yes, in meantime, Python has gained ground - as has Ruby.
But I think there's one thing that's easy to forget - Perl6 has also been losing ground to Perl5. People need to get their jobs done; if you need Yet Another Hack Built Around An Awesome CPAN Mod
Perl6 has *not* been released (Score:5, Informative)
About Parrot .. (Score:2, Interesting)
I do know that for
Re:About Parrot .. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, you can also write a CGI script in Perl that can import some PHP library, for another example.
This is much like Microsoft's DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), which intends to make the world of
dom
Re:About Parrot .. (Score:5, Informative)
Binaries that launch and run at the speed of C with the ability to write in a high level language? Sounds like the future of programming to me.
The big question I have is will multiple programs be able to share memory to store a commonly used library like C can. One of the things I think causes big inefficiencies in modern languages is the way they don't share memory well. If I have a C library that has, say, 5 megs of pure code in it and I'm running 10 copies of a program that uses it, all 10 can use the same 5 meg copy with only parts that are written to localized to the application. With high level languages, I need to use 50 megs of memory for each. Can Parrot share like C does and have all copies of the program reference the one copy stored in memory? Java and
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That's definitely a goal. I think we'll need to make at least one change to the garbage collector such that we don't trigger copy-on-write for shared memory pages o
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Not Quite Finished Yet, But... (formatted) (Score:5, Informative)
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved.
If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give
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To all the detractors (Score:5, Informative)
People have been arguing for who knows how long about syntax. At some point the argument has to end and someone has to implement that syntax. It's not an easy thing to bring either of these points to conclusion.
Parrot is register based, not stack based. Perl has been developed using Haskell, and eventually it will come to the point where perl can be compiled with itself. These are monumental tasks for volunteer workers pursuing some pretty hefty goals for the sake of pursuing them.
Pugs [pugscode.org] has been working for quite some time already, and its an easy transition for anybody already familiar with perl.
I can see criticizing the project because it's hard for a newbie to figure out how to help, or criticizing the syntax in favor of ruby/python/etc, or criticizing performance (although both Perl6 and Parrot perform very well IMO), but criticizing the time it has taken to build? Get off your high horse and go build your next big Web 2.0 script that can do anything as long as you have less than 100 daily visitors.
Re:To all the detractors (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really very helpful. I still feel like an expat perl programmer but I have rails/nginx sites that see over 100,000 people a day without any difficulty. They're clustered over four servers, none of which peaks at more than a half of its capacity. Five years ago I was running similarly busy sites under mod_perl and apache 1.3.x. The architecture was more powerful but less robust. I could do much all sorts of interesting things with the apache lifecycle - rails feels like lego by comparison - but the whole assembly was flaky and temperamental, each mod_perl process took up to 50MB and I lived in constant fear of the whole thing falling over.
That probably has as much to do with my code quality as anything else (and the 'interesting things') but it does show that the modern high level frameworks are a viable alternative. Rails doesn't scale well but it does cluster well, and hardware is cheap. I miss the quality of people you get in the perl community, the quality of documentation (out here they think that having a blog counts) and the cheerful absurdism. I don't miss the posturing and strop, and in terms of getting things done I'm much better off than I was.
Time runs fast (Score:2)
There will never be _the_ "Perl 6" release! (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl 5 is a interpreter which happens to grok Perl 5. It's the one and only implementation that implements all features (by definition). There is no other specification.
Perl 6 is not a interpreter or compiler. It's a specification and as such there will be many implementations. Do you know what the current "release" of C++ is? See...
Want to use Perl 6 today? Use Pugs [pugscode.org].
Ill-conceived you mean (Score:3)
Theres a lot of revolutionary features in parrot. Its unpopular so its fun to bash it but I expect the
The same way people who bash Linux just don't get it, the people who bash parrot just don't get it. Peel back the covers and you'll be impressed.
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Nice troll. As a free-software supporting atheist, I can't think of a much more obnoxious mockery of those ideals than your post.
Re:BFD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Python is overly simplistic, making it difficult to do certain types of interesting programming.
This is by design, Python is meant to be dumbed down (in the sense that Java is) and have a clean small footprint.
Ruby is slow, even by scripting language standards (in the main implementation, anyways).
This is by design (well ok, not really), but Ruby needs to support all those gorgeous abstraction layers somehow.
Both of them aren't that amazing when it comes to Unicode (like Perl or Java), don't have built in security-hardened modes (like Perl's tainting or PHP's weird data firewall thingy, etc), aren't as portable as they might be (like EBCDIC, VMS, S390 and other places that aren't Unix or Windows) and their package repositories lack sophistication and the ability to properly nest dependencies in a cross-platform way (like Perl, Fortran, R and Erlang).
So by all means, if you have simple programming needs on lowest-common-denominator environments doing ordinary things and you don't stretch far beyond the core libraries, by all means go with a language that fits your brain the best, be it Perl, Python, Ruby, Brainfuck, whatever.
If you want to integrate with C code inside the rendering pipeline of a movie render farm while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python.
I'm still not sure of anywhere that Ruby is a standout success... Rails has jumped the shark and is in decline, and I'm not aware of any major use cases...
Perl is still a brilliant language to get the simple things done really really fast but tieing together half a dozen CPAN modules, while still having the ability to scale your code base up a hell of a long way, and the knowledge that it's fairly easy to write highly portable code.
Re:BFD? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that I understand that wrong and that you don't consider unintelligible, unmaintainable, code 'interesting' in a good sense.
Because my mama taught me to comb my hair, keep my fingernails clean and write code that other humans can understand without wanting to couge their eyes out with a fork.
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You don't happen to be mrs. roberts's [xkcd.com] child, do you?
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OK--here goes:
Perl has to many shifted numbers as part of is syntax.
English words are too hard to spell.
Lisp is backwards and all of the parentheses make it hard to read.
Python is named af
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Re:BFD? (Score:4, Insightful)
Working lambdas (especially closures), for one.
How ironic that you praise Scheme's design in this context. The ambiguous parsing of vertical whitespace leads directly to the broken lambda problem. Now that's probably fine for a teaching language, but plenty of people seem to think that Python is a language that scales up for experts. If that's the case, perhaps it's appropriate to judge the design of Python in terms of how it supports important features on which to build larger and more elegant abstractions.
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Holy cow! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:BFD? (Score:5, Informative)
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If you haven't seen any of those daft kitty pictures with captions, like a cat watching a washing machine with "TH