Larry Wall Approves Re-Naming Perl 6 To Raku (github.com) 100
Long-time Slashdot reader hondo77 notes that Larry Wall has given his approval to the re-naming of Perl 6.
In the "Path to Raku" pull request, Larry Wall indicated his approval, leaving this comment: I am in favor of this change, because it reflects an ancient wisdom:
"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
"Perl 6 will become Raku, assuming the four people who haven't yet approved the pull request give their okay," reports the Register, adding that Perl 5 will then become simply Perl.
Dozens of comments on that pull request have now already been marked as "outdated," and while a few contributors have made a point of abstaining from the approval process, reviewer Alex Daniel notes that "this pull request will be merged on October 14th if nobody in the list rejects it or requests more changes."
In the "Path to Raku" pull request, Larry Wall indicated his approval, leaving this comment: I am in favor of this change, because it reflects an ancient wisdom:
"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
"Perl 6 will become Raku, assuming the four people who haven't yet approved the pull request give their okay," reports the Register, adding that Perl 5 will then become simply Perl.
Dozens of comments on that pull request have now already been marked as "outdated," and while a few contributors have made a point of abstaining from the approval process, reviewer Alex Daniel notes that "this pull request will be merged on October 14th if nobody in the list rejects it or requests more changes."
Finnish "raakku" (Score:4, Interesting)
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means freshwater pearl mussel. Just sayin'.
. . . and Raku is Japanese pottery.
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Re:Finnish "raakku" (Score:5, Funny)
I keep thinking that Raku sounds familiar... Maybe I bought one at IKEA.
Raku (Score:3)
I keep thinking that Raku sounds familiar...
Well, it's a pottery technique so if you happen to know a Perl 6 programmer here's a fun gift idea [modernartisans.com] that seems somewhat appropriate.
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It means "asplosive diarrhoea" in Santee Sioux Indian.
My head asplode at this move, Perl has worldwide recognition and they're renaming it to something that sounds like you'd buy it at Ikea? Is this a premature April 1 post?
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I see you've chosen "obtuse belligerence" today. Did you keep a straight face when you typed that raku is a "completely" different word from raakku?
Let me spell it out for you:
Perl is like the word Pearl with unnecessary letters removed.
Raku is like the word Raakku with unnecessary letters removed.
Raakku is related to Pearls. Raku is related to Perl.
Wordplay! That's why he shared it and how he got modded up.
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It sounds an awful lot like a thin tomato sauce..a ragu.
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In Romanian, "racul" (pronounced exactly like "Raku") means "the lobster", "the crab" or "the crayfish". In Astrology context, it is the name for Cancer.
https://context.reverso.net/tr... [reverso.net]
Why? (Score:3)
Re: Why? (Score:3)
Anyone miss Perl 3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back then it was by far the best language in its niche --- a nicer sed+awk, and the cleanest lightweight scripting language of all.
But then Perl 4 added some complexity (I forget what ... more complex references) and Perl 5 decided to compete with C++ in the contest of
and somehow Perl won.
Re: Anyone miss Perl 3? (Score:4)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that "Perl 6" in hindsight was a mistake. Initially the idea was a VM that would run Perl 5 really fast. And that there would be a beta in a year or two. And then Larry Wall started coming up with a huge list of changes.
That sent a message to people: Perl 6 will be out soon, and there will be significant changes, probably backwards incompatible. Best not to do anything too important on Perl 5 right now, and wait until 6.
And then Perl 6 failed to happen. But there was the perception that Perl 5 would die sooner or later, so work started shifting away from it. But there wasn't a functional Perl 6 either. And another problem emerged: Perl 6 isn't compatible with XS, so even if the syntax was compatible, a huge amount of modules wouldn't work and would need a complete rewrite. So Perl 6 wasn't really an upgrade to Perl 5, but a new, different and incompatible language.
The idea behind the name change is to recognize that the initial plan failed and to acknowledge the difference. People should treat Perl 6/Raku as a new, different thing that might have some similarities in style to Perl 5, but not expect any sort of continuity or upgrade path.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea that "Perl 6" in hindsight was a mistake. Initially the idea was a VM that would run Perl 5 really fast. And that there would be a beta in a year or two. And then Larry Wall started coming up with a huge list of changes.
A needless slander. I was there, it wasn't like that at all.
As Larry Wall said back then; Perl 5 was his rewrite of Perl 4. Perl 6 was the community's rewrite of Perl 5. It was the community that wanted all these new things. Perl 6 failed to happen for a long time, but by the time I jumped ship in 2004 it was already usable. The problem wasn't that it didn't work, or that modules didn't work, the problem was that it was a Homer Car of a language. It was fear of the new code that some people were writing. Perl was already a difficult language to read, the idea of all these new features was just ridiculous to the majority of people who had no use for them.
There was enough backwards compatibility that old code wasn't really the problem. For the most part, people didn't even try.
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It's hard to get stories like this completely accurate, but it pretty much is the case that Perl 6 started out as the next perl, but once the decision was made to break backwards compatibility and do a total re-design, the project diverged into developing a totally new language (however "perl flavored" it might seem), and things dragged on forever...
From the point of view of a perl5 person, the question "why should we switch?" never really had a good answer, because there was and is nothing really all th
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Which community you mean? The community of wizards that hack on the interpreter's code? Maybe.
But there's a larger community of people who write Perl and don't delve into the arcane internals, and I would say a good amount of those were disappointed.
The compatibility isn't there for anything non-trivial. You can't port a Wx app to Perl 6 because there are no Perl 6 bindings. The Perl 5 can't work because XS isn't a thing in Perl 6, and all this means that a huge amount of things on CPAN can't be ported to P
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It was an open process where the community would submit RFCs and discuss them, then Larry Wall would grade them on the quality of both the problem, and the solution.
There community was merely all the people who were interested in being involved in the process back in 2001 or whenever until whenever they froze the process.
I'd never hacked on the interpreter code, and I participated.
Wx Bindings for Perl6 (Score:2)
If Wx isn't that large, I might take a stab at porting it... who knows. :)
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If they'd have named it Raku 20 years ago, I might still be a Perl hacker! LOL
The short story is that Perl 6 is the language that never was, and remained so even after it was completed.
Excellent (Score:3)
That will make it easier to ignore the gold-plated messed-up "second system effect" Perl 6 and get good use of simply "Perl".
It is a bit tragic, because a lot of capable people invested a lot if time into Perl 6. It is still a failed project.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
>> It is a bit tragic, because a lot of capable people invested a lot if time into Perl 6. It is still a failed project.
It could be considered a failed project, I suppose, but so was Multics, and the ideas and lessons learned from that helped to spawn Unix.
The road to success is paved with many failures... where did I hear that?
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You are certainly correct. What makes me a bit sad is that we still have not figured out how to do this right on the first attempt. But the effort is not all wasted.
Re: Excellent (Score:1)
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The lesson learned from Perl is "don't do this".
Perl is a horrific disaster, a hodge-podge of random stuff. I last used it close to 20 years ago and it still annoys me.
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Stay away form regexp pattern extensions if you want to keep your sanity! On a more serious note, I found that I never needed them. I had to, on occasion, implement some matcher myself though.
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And nothing can go wrong with that approach, eh? But the important thing is to be able to say you don't use those damn regexps.
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Where did I say I was not using regexps? Oh, wait, I did not. I very specifically was talking about "pattern extensions" only.
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If you're expecting Perl 6-- I mean, Raku-- to be a drop-in replacement for some other language, then I suppose you might call it a "failure", but what it is is something entirely new. It is possible that it might turn out to be criticially important in some new field that we're not thinking about yet-- much as the original perl turned out to be key for Web 1.0 and the human genome project-- or perhaps not. At present a lot of us think it's fun to play with, which is more
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FOCAL is fun to play with, You just need to spin up your PDP-8 emulator, or a real PDP-8/e if you have one lying around....
Thematic, then (Score:1, Offtopic)
--Thomas 23
That's a lot of camels. Or more bipedal resources.
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Given that no one has bothered to explain "what the fuck this is all about", and the fact that it seems like an irrelevant cosmetic change, certainly contributes to those types of posts.
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Re:In B4 (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing to do with SJWs. Just bad project management.
I can't speak with any authority, but I was also interested in the question, so I did some digging around. The TL;DR is:
The project attracted a fair amount of people interested in experimentation. People who wanted to run a serious project with deadlines and to deliver something functional fast were driven away over time. The project floundered because nobody had a serious plan to release something that worked. People who didn't like that were driven away over time. The people who stuck around were the ones who didn't mind the chaos. And Larry Wall was unwilling to crack the whip and I think hoped that things would sort themselves out over time.
So I guess the lesson here is that sometimes a boss is breathing down your neck for a reason.
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Re: Are they sure? (Score:1)
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I never heard about a Ford Taurus.
But I know what Raku is.
As there was a famous Raku movement in the USA starting around 1950, I wondwr why YOU don't know what it is.
Does it matter? (Score:3)
The cynic in me asks if it even matters?
In my previous job anything Perl was being migrated to Python and in another job the grey beard was so fed up of being the sole developer he is open to someone rewriting the tools in another language.
As someone who hasn't followed Perl in depth for a while, is the development cycle still slow? Everything felt like a committee effort last I was there.
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Perl niche was back in the mid-1990s because it had fast and efficient Regex processing. This was useful back then because Database systems were expensive and took up a lot of Computing power. Having a web site or a lot of other applications powered by Perl was quite useful, as it would rather easily do the job of a database, often working with flat files.
The decline of Perl is the rise of the database. MySQL and PostgreSQL became competitive to other expense Commerical DB out there and also at that time
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perl niche was back in the mid-1990s because it had fast and efficient Regex processing. This was useful back then because Database systems were expensive and took up a lot of Computing power. Having a web site or a lot of other applications powered by Perl was quite useful, as it would rather easily do the job of a database, often working with flat files. ... .NET ... that were coming out took better usage of DB calls and really had their advantages in different areas. Thus making Perl obsolete.
Other Languages like PHP, Python,
Perl did what it needed to do, the problem is technology changed in a way that undercut Perls primary benefit, text processing.
I don't know that I would quite agree with that. Text processing (which includes rich text and data structure processing) is still very much a needed thing. What perl can't provide is *memory-constricted* data structure analysis in a useful manner, but that's only a certain subset of problems. Anything relational is already being handed off to your DB engine and while DBI may seem clunky, it still does the job it needs to. And there are plenty of us who still need the regex speed for memory or data streams that perl excels at.
Where perl has truly missed out, IMO, is the rise of microservice scripting. I can't begin to tell you the number of tiny, poorly-coded python web services I've run into, most of which have a weird, complex array of specific dependencies necessitating a virtualenv that's annoying to move around. NodeJS is barely any better as a language framework, and is even more fragile as an ecosystem. Containers solve some of those problems, but that just offloads the complexity elsewhere. Perl really needed an easy onramp for creation of these microservices and there was such an aversion to it at that critical time that it missed the boat. (Ironic, considering its '90s era roots as *the* CGI language of choice, and half the web services out there are just python modules wrapped around an HTTPd listener, which describes the A and P in a LAMP Stack just fine.)
Had perl been popular enough to displace the python bottle's of the world, it would have been strong enough to provide a counterpoint to the rise of server-side JS, which perl beats for performance and features in almost every respect.
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Yes. Perl5 (which I can now, thankfully go back to just calling "Perl"), has full unicode support combined with one of the fullest-featured regular expression engines (the other guys are always playing catch-up, still). It's been one of the fastest scripting languages for some time--
If the difference went the other way, there would be no end of smart guys trumpeting how much better their language
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has full unicode support combined with one of the fullest-featured regular expression engines (the other guys are always playing catch-up, still)
Full-featured in what way? Levels of unreadability and lack of code modularity in its first-order regex language? Surely not levels of performance. [swtch.com]
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Slight off topic, but talking of full unicode support, I wonder whether Slashdot will ever take advantage of that in its current Perl based implementation. Well that and IPv6.
Actually is the /. still open source?
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It is not the language, it is the programmer.
Well, it is the langusge, a programmer writing mediocre code in Python would write horrible code in Perl.
I don't use Perl anymore since roughly 1999.
I don't like forensic development, where I need a handbook to understand my own code, I wrote 5 years ago.
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I don't like forensic development, where I need a handbook to understand my own code, I wrote 5 years ago.
If you can't understand your own code five or even one year later, don't blame the language.
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Well, if I can understand C code I wrote from 5 years ago with no trouble, and Ruby code I wrote 5 years ago with no trouble, but it is hard to read Perl code I wrote 6 months earlier, maybe it is just me. Maybe I have a Perl intolerance or something. Or maybe, if lots of other people have the same experience, there is "something to it."
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Ah, you are right, thats it. A Perl intolerance. If I would be hit with it more often, I perhaps would join a helping group? ... mind wanking.
I took the liberty to look at Perl 6 an hour ago. It is completely incomprehensible bullshit
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You will have to tell me how:
... Do string handling ... } ... Do integer handling ... } ...Do boolean handing ... } ... Fallback handling... }
^10000.grep( *.is-prime).say; # Retrieve prime numbers from 0-10,000
Is incomprehsible bullshit and:
given $value {
when Str {
when Int {
when Bool {
default {
}
Is mind wanking....
If you've really tried the language, why not give it a comprehensive review?
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Rofl,
picking out a comprehensible part does not make the rest less mind wanking.
E.g. take a look into signatures.
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Why should I not blame the language? We are talking about PERL, remember?
It is the only thing to blame if you don't grasp what is going on ...
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
.
At some point, a language is done or so nearly it no longer matters if there's really a development cycle. You're supposed to be doing useful things WITH that language, not having to adapt to the tool changing underneath your feet.
.
This in fact annoys me as for example, the text editor (basically notepad) and calculator in linux change every release of every distro or so it seems. More often than not it's because say "gedit is no longer in development" - well bozo, maybe that's because it was finished and does its job fine now - if I want sublime text or nano, they're already there - not to mention vi or emacs..how many "simplest gui editor" versions make sense anyway?
.
Perhaps its just a way to keep interns busy with something they think matters while they learn to code? I for one am getting tired of having to adapt to crazy changes in what should be the simplest of tools - where did that 1/x button go? Oh, the improved version lost a bunch of features, again....Not to worry, they'll be back in a few years...
.
Learning a new editor is one thing. Having to re-write a big application because the language changed is NOT OK. Fine if you're a sinecure-seeking hack who needs job security just doing maintenance...I suppose.
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For me it wasn’t so much the slow cycle of the language, but the slow introduction of Unicode and IPv6. When I had tried to participate it was hard to get a proper conversation going and trying to understand why the http library wasn’t supporting IPv6. It felt more waterfall than evolutionary. At that point I left the cathedral and walked into the bazar of more vibrant communities.
Stupid (Score:2)
Either Raki or Ragú.
Bit late, innit? (Score:2)
Then again, maybe we can now rename Python 3 to Cobra or somesuch. From where I sit the Python changes hit a lot harder than the perl changes. Then again, most of my perl is a handful of lines doing something specific, usually written 10+ years ago and not looked at since. My Python is thousands of lines making an app.
/ old stuff still Python 2
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Yes, it is a bit late, but then there's no particular reason not to do it now just because it (probably) should've been done a while ago.
Anyway: future generations should take note that it's a bad idea to name a new language like a new version. And if a project is gradually changing from an upgrade into a new system, it's a good idea to recognize where that's going as early as possible...
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Well,
Anaconda is already taken for some Python stuff.
So I like the Cobra idea (pun intended)
So, if you are retiring, do you look for a successor?
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Rubber Boa
OK. (Score:2)
a lesson for marketers (Score:2)
Marketers like to rename things so they can feel like they accomplished something and feel they have something new to hype.
Most of the time that just annoys and confuses people, and sometimes consigns something to oblivion.
Someone will say "Ragu language" and people will go "what the hell is that?"
At least with "Perl 6" people knew it was "that next version of Perl with an obscene amount of features that no one uses."
"Another day, another Doug..."
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Calling it something other than perl firewalls it away so that nobody will make the mistake of porting their perl5 code to the 'new version.'
It's a good thing. Perl5 is finished, only maintenance is needed.
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Perl5 is finished, only maintenance is needed.
Nonsense.
Release history [perl.org]
Changelogs [perl.org]
It's not done. But it keeps getting better and better
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It's converging toward perfection, not morphing into something else or 'evolving.'
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From those links you looked up but didn't read:
Perl 5 introduced everything else, including the ability to
introduce everything else.
Done.
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Next logical insight, dipshit?
Dumb move.. (Score:1)
Isn't Raku a spaghetti sauce? (Score:2)
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Renaming Perl into something associated with spaghetti won't help its reputation as a write-only language.
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Pronunciation? (Score:2)
The term Raku is problematic because its pronunciation, at least in English, is not obvious. Is the a-sound long or short? Is the stress on the first or second syllable?
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Not really. It would be rah as in rah-rah-rah, followed by coo, as in cuckoo. With an stress on each vowel.
For it to be pronounced otherwise it would need additional letters.
The name "Raku"... (Score:3)
This is turning into a FAQ I think, To quote pvaldes (from over at reddit):
I gather that the name of the style of pottery has interesting overtones, something like an embrace of chance results achieved by experiment... (aka "hacking"?).
Anyway, "Raku" wasn't my favorate candidate for a new name, but I'm happy to hear that the official name-change has gone through. The previous situation was an annoyance to both the new language and the original perl it it forked off from...
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I love the old Perl, and I'd really like Perl 6 to make a comeback... but I'm worried that apart from being ugly, "Raku" might be too close to "Rakuten," and given the latter's recent attempts to popularize their name as a brand (e.g. renaming Ebates), I would expect them to sue.
The camel meaning is amusing, but they should have gone with a name that evokes a sense of a gemstone like Perl did. A new name might not wipe away the bad publicity, but it would at least make it easier to search for distinctly Per
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I would've said the thing to learn from Rakuten's experience is that American's have difficulty dealing with even simple Japanese names. "Raku" wasn't my pick, but Damien Conway likes it, and he outranks me.
One thing I will say though, since I personally dislike "Raku" there's a strong possibility it will catch on. I am not someone you want to put in charge of marketing.
Pascal - Modula II (Score:5, Interesting)
Pascal died after being renamed to Modula II, and so did Modula II, instead of Pascal vwhateveritneededtobe.
This is signing the death knell of pearl.
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Pascal isn't dead yet but it has been sidelined for a very long time. In particular Microsoft Visual C++ killed development interest in Pascal on Windows. Borland Delphi offered a moderately popular resurgence when it was seen as more powe
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I still like pascal as a teaching language. I usually use it as a second language I teach people. After basic. Have to teach people what spaghetti code is after all.
Then I can make them into a great C person.
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Pascal and Modula II are completely different languages
And as far as I am aware, Modula died and Pascal is alife and striving: https://www.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]
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I was told that Pascal has been pronounced "Delphi" for the past 25 years. And I believe it, because I've been seeing it listed as a job requirement for that long. I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything called Modula listed.
The name? (Score:3)
Couldn't they have named it something a little less likely to cause market confusion like "Amazoon" or "Nutflix"?
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I don't think it is used for any of that business-y stuff though, that has "markets" and care about "confusion."
"Rakghoul" (Score:1)
Raku....Roku... (Score:1)
Sure is FUD in here (Score:1)
As a long time Perl user, I think this is a great solution and a rather obvious one at that. Lot of upmodded comments saying "perl6 is/will be a failure." Perl has always had a lot of FUD, some of the reductive criticism is warranted but useless.
Python courted plebs and Perl has always been a technician's toy. Technicians aren't going to care about a name change except the practical ramifications of clearing up the compatibility issue.
Still, it makes me wonder where all this FUD comes from. Who wants to
Take a look at it (Score:1)
If you are not familiar with Perl6/Raku, you should take a look at it. It is really a very powerful language. The fact that it took 15 years to develop--with volunteer labor--and a few diversions along the way has hurt it in mind share among developers, but that doesn't mean that the final result is without merit. There are a lot of good Perl 6 references on the web, but most suffer from trying to do too much with the language too fast. Like many languages, you don't have to learn it all to find it very
No respect for tradition (Score:1)
Perl for all its foibles, and it had many, is still a mainstay of programming language history. Amazon was originally written in mod_perl. Lincoln Stein's torture.pl was written in Perl. Hell, the file type suffix .pl means Perl and, really, it always will mean Perl.
When someone first handed me the Perl O'Reilly book, my reaction was, no way am I going to program in a language whose reference manual is that thick. And indeed, Perl contains many baroque constructs enough to make me wonder if Larry wall had
Could we also vote... (Score:2)
Roku? (Score:2)