Perl 6, Early, With Rakudo Star 220
Perl 6 may have been "finally coming within reach" in 2004, but now it's even closer. Reader rnddim writes "The Perl 6 implementation Rakudo Star has been released today for 'early adopters.' This release of Rakudo is different from the normal monthly compiler releases in that it is bundled with a draft of a Perl 6 book, and several modules. It's not complete, and it's not as fast as it should be, but Rakudo in its current state is proving to be usable and useful. Rakudo Star releases will come monthly or as major features or bugfixes are made. It is available for download at github.com."
Welcome Rakudo Star (Score:5, Informative)
The Welcome Rakudo Star [perl.com] post on the new Perl.com explains some of the motivations for the Star releases and why this is such a big milestone for all of Perl.
Re:Does anyone care? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:github is a trap (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is that "Perl" you speak of? (Score:2, Informative)
My business does just fine starting new things in Perl, and I'm by no means alone in that.
Re:Perl 6 introduction? (Score:4, Informative)
Rakudo Star includes a PDF of the Perl 6 introduction book [github.com]; the print version should come out late next month. Moritz Lenz's Perl 5 to 6 [perlgeek.de] article series is always informative and useful. The official Perl 6 site's documentation page [perl6.org] links to current and accurate documentation.
Re:A decade too late. (Score:2, Informative)
What suggests that any new language or version of a language has to "steal" attention from any other existing language to succeed?
Re:github is a trap (Score:4, Informative)
most code is written with the intent of releasing
Not true.
Re:A decade too late. (Score:2, Informative)
There are six and a half billion people in the world programming in neither. Now I suffer no illusion that all of them will become programmers, but it's no long bet to believe that more of them will become programmers. I care about that helping them solve their problems far more than about getting the mayfly attention of people who flit between the latest releases of dozens of languages, because the latter will move on to Haskell Prime or Java 7 or Factor soon enough anyway.
Re:Does anyone care? (Score:3, Informative)
[L. Wall]: They've designed languages intended more to keep the computer happy than the programmer.
The problem is that programming in Perl quite often is not a happy experience for the programmer. Too much magic. Too much line noise. I do admit, though, that there's a quite useful subset of Perl that is fun to program in -- for scripts, anyways. Anything larger that benefits from data structures gets to be a mess, fast.
Re:A decade too late. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know. My interest lies in doing other things with Perl 6. I'd like to see a minimal hosting environment for Perl 6 applications based on something like Parrot bytecode, but we're not quite to the point where we can bundle an entire application, run it in its own memory space, and offer sandboxing and other limits.
(I agree completely about PHP's advantages in the cheap shared hosting world.)
Re:github is a trap (Score:5, Informative)
Care to elaborate?
One would think the meaning is obvious, but I'll spell it out: the vast, vast majority of code is developed to be used in-house. A tiny, miniscule fraction of code "is written with the intent of releasing an application to the general population."
Re:A decade too late. (Score:5, Informative)
From someone who worked there 2 years ago- mason and Java are in totally different places and not competing with one another. The backend is dominated by C++ and Java. Mason was never used for backend- it's a front end concept. And it's widely in use there by the front end. I don't know of any front end code written in java or JSP. For frontend mason wasn't going anywhere, it was too easy to integrate perl with the middleware stack to talk to backend services. There wasn't any way as of 2 years ago to do that with php, python, etc. THey may end up using a different framework than mason, but it'll stay perl due to that.
Re:A decade too late. (Score:2, Informative)
> I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins.
You'd probably lose. Its everywhere.
> Where are the great perl-based frameworks?
Catalyst is where its at. And if you need a one-off framework, CGI::Application is easy as pie.
Coupled with the CPAN, the ecology of other languages look pretty useless to me.
There are a lot of people using perl. I've been introduced to new several new industries lately, and perl lets me develop apps that would need a team of HPCs and millions of dollars to do. And the new projects and requests keep on queuing up.
To me the biggest reason people don't hear much about perl is because its proponents and users are too busy getting stuff done.
Fortune of Perl (Score:5, Informative)
Trying to remember what specifically was wrong with Perl; issues that eat up hours of time the first time you encounter them or when they aren't freshly in your memory:
having a $1 instead of a $l.
Arrays of arrays. Hashes of hashes. References to hashes of arrays... etc. Then pass them into a subroutine that is part of a class.
Using the debugger.
Trying to understand someone else's regular expression
a mysterious $_ in someone else's uncommented code
A class's function's reference. WTF does "can't create sub Main:: " mean? If I can call the function why can't I reference it?
Trying to use parenthesis to change precedence only to accidentally create an array instead.
Not knowing that parenthesis can create an array
Trying to create a naked hash
Thinking my $a, $b, $c = @something; is the same as my ($a,$b,$c) = @something;
Coming across the heap corruption bug in IO::uncompress in earlier versions
Not knowing how to typecast using squiggly brackets
Not realizing the requirement that arrays and hashes be typecasted after being dereferenced from a reference
Trying to read from standard input
Trying to write to a file
Not understanding the difference between print and printf
Not being able to slice a substring from a string
Not being able to index a character in a string
Trying to use a class like you would in C++
Trying to use a $ when it should be a @ or vice versa.
Trying to see if a file exists
Trying to use @somearray to get the number of elements, as directed by a website, only to get the array instead. (i.e. not knowing about the scalar keyword) Trying to read a line of Perl out loud
And more...
And Perl 6 doesn't improve anything at all. Be ready to do some legitimate stuff that won't do what you thought it would do... all over again!
Some of my favorites:
Was: $#array+1 or scalar(@array)
Now: @array.elems
The easy to read __FILE__ is now $?FILE
Was: $str =~ m/^\d{2,5}\s/i
Now: $str ~~ m:P5:i/^\d{2,5}\s/
Was: if (-r $file && -x _) {...}
Now: if $file ~~
Yes sirree, they really helped improved the shortfalls of Perl. It really was not $$bugprone.enough(@{($confusing, $hardto$read)}).
Some Companies using Perl to build Big Site (Score:5, Informative)
http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst [catalystframework.org]
That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.
So you are wrong in your guess that "80%" of Perl programmers are sysadmins writing cron jobs. Whoever modded you up should have done a bit of checking, because marking your opinion as insightful is highly inaccurate.
There have been several new Perl books written just for Catalyst in the past two years, so just because you are not finding anything new for Mason (which is probably not the framework of choice for the modern Perl programmer anyway) that is not much of an indicator. There's tons of FREE docs and examples for Perl in any case (http://search.cpan.org/)
As far as Google's lack of commitment to Perl, well, I'm sorry to hear about that, but that's one company. Google Appengine is a pretty small garden, and the Perl interpreter has trouble running under its confinement. To be honest, Python doesn't run everything under appengine either, you need to write code for appengine. I think getting PHP or other languages to run under it will be equally difficult.
If you want to program in Perl on the cloud you have a ton of options, such as EC2, Rackspace cloud and pretty much any cloud provider with an open system (not Appengines walled garden) Oh, and if you want a smarter search engine, trying http://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com], which is written in Perl and I find more useful than Google search.
I realize that the Perl community needs to do a better job showing that we are not stuck in 1998, so I forgive your lack of knowledge in this matter. I do actually appreciate the opportunity to discuss it, since this is really the only way this perception problem with be solved. However I hope you can meet me halfway and do a bit of checking on modern Perl before you make such sweeping judgments again. Because to be honest this exact opinion you've expressed I've seen over and over again for several years, and it's totally different from what I see everyday, as a fulltime, highly paid Perl programmer for at least 15 years. Take a look at Moose (http://moose.perl.org/) if you think Perl's OO is lagging, or Plack (http://plackperl.org/) if you think Mason and mod_perl is all we have, for example. Our community is smart, diverse, highly active and strongly focused on the next 20 years of Perl.
John Napiorkowski
Re:Some Companies using Perl to build Big Site (Score:1, Informative)
http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/sitesrunningcatalyst [catalystframework.org]
That's just those using Catalyst (a popular Perl based Model View Controller system) but if you glance down the list you are going to see some huge sites with big, big traffic loads. All new stuff, things launched within the past two/three years max. BBC iPlayer alone is one of the heaviest hit sites on the web, and that's Perl.
Actually you're wrong on the iPlayer comment. Yes, current iPlayer runs on Perl but the new one which will replace it does not. It is actually PHP web app instead (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/05/introducing_the_all_new_bbc_ip.html), with Java thrown in for some services. So wonder what that says for Perl that a high volume site is moving away from Perl to PHP.
As far as I'm aware Perl is still used in parts of the new iPlayer site but it doesn't have the same major role as it did before.
Re:it's not hipness (Score:2, Informative)
it's ambiguous.
No it isn't.
Is the string an integer? A floating point number? Is it hex, binary, or octal?
Perl will figure out which it is automatically and correctly every time