Larry Wall announces that Perl6 is ready for production | Hacker News Reader

Larry Wall announces that Perl6 is ready for production

perl6advent.wordpress.com

149 pointsanaolykarpov41 comments

I expect that the reaction from most of the HN community will be somewhat similar to "why use perl these days when there are so many other more modern choices," but reading the spec there are a lot of nice things in perl6, including the static type system, macro support, and improved patter matching. The syntax still feels a little antiquated, but there is an awful lot to like in this new release, and i expect that so very expressive, not overly opaque code will be written using this.

Note that Perl 6 now is really a brand new language. The old Perl continues to chug along in the form of Perl 5 (with yearly releases and feature additions). As such, Perl 6 is a modern language, with all that you can expect to have in one.

> why use perl these days when there are so many other more modern choices

I appreciate that you don't mean ill, and in fact wrote your post in support. However i'd like to point out that this sentiment is a little bit uninformed; both about Perl 6 (as it really is a new language) and Perl 5 (as it still keeps putting innovations in production that other languages have yet to catch up on).

Some research and asking about either of these comes with a lot of opportunity to be surprised and delighted. :)

I don't think he's saying that it is ready for production just yet. I don't want to piss on this parade, it's certainly a milestone, but there are problems too.

The compiler release that is happening today has not been vetted for stability, performance, etc beyond the regular - it's as 'production-ready' as any other of the monthly releases.

However, the language definition has been frozen, and Perl6 programs you write after today are supposed to keep working.

Basically, it's a promise by the developers to stop breaking stuff willy-nilly.

So I gathered. It's an invitation of sorts, for people to start using it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves with this 'production-ready' idea.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10786423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10788786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789464

Please look and see if there's already a recent thread, everyone. Also, this wasn't the production-readiness announcement, this is an essay on the end of the long Advent, and hopes for the future.

That said: yeah, it's happening today.

None of those posts had a significant discussion, so they don't count as dupes on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I'm excited by this, although I feel that the announcement a couple months back about it being released this Christmas carried all the release hype with it haha. I'm glad 6.Christmas is packaged and shipped. Have fun and happy holidays everyone.

I'm glad 6.Christmas is packaged and shipped.

It isn't (yet). Stay tuned.

Do you know where an announcement will be posted when it is?

https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is-he...

Congratulations Larry. It is a big effort.

I was writing some perl 6 just as I saw this.

Perl6 seems like a fantastic language, but one of the things I'm most interested to see how turn out is the way it is being branded for tweenage girls.

NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS: This is not a joke. E.g., http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2015/10/06/the-night-larry-wall-... "the new butterfly logo for Perl 6 'is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls. The Python community has done a much better job appealing to kids with fun stuff.'"

> This is not a joke.

> is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls

but this is

But why? Most of tech confs are sausage fests. It's time we start addressing the sex inequality issue in our trade.

Maybe because smart people are usually interested in equal opportunity, not equal representation.

Culture matters. It's not enough to have equal opportunity in theory, you also have to make people realize that they have this option as well as make them feel welcome.

But just certain people for certain jobs, right? We don't need to make women feel welcome in the mining community or men in the nursing one, do we?

We do. But as programmers, we're generally not in a position to do anything about those.

Of course we can help. Let's start making sites promoting a 50/50 sex distribution in all the mines! Let's convince Google and Facebook to finance "mining girls" programs, both inside and outside schools. Let's start shaming male miners for being males and discriminate against them when hiring!

What can possibly go wrong?

It's not about reaching gender parity, or shaming. It's about merit and bias.

Jobs that are, on average, more suitable for a person of a certain sex do exist. But it's a loss to society to culturally enforce gender-based barriers to entry: You want to leverage the high-performance end of the bell curve of either sex.

So when people discuss statistics about women/ethnic minorities/eye color in tech, you really think it's about breaking barriers to entry and not about mirroring the composition of the general population in a ridiculous failure to understand the sampling bias?

Actually, yes.

Then you need to question the underlying assumptions, because your conclusion is wrong. Start with this: given equal opportunity, any self selected group will mirror the composition of the general population.

You seem to be making strident arguments against ridiculous points that nobody is making.

Maybe you don't see past the reductio ad absurdum.

Every single time sexism in tech is mentioned someone will crawl out and say "but what about women in mining?" or "what about men in nursing?"

What's happening? Are people too stupid to put "women in mining" into a search engine? Too lazy? Too dishonest?

WIM (Women in mining)

http://www.womeninmining.org.uk/

Male Nursing

http://www.nurselookup.com/index.html

http://www.aamn.org/

> someone will crawl out

From a mine shaft, I hope. Please encourage your daughter to follow the dream she doesn't know she has, yet, and go take her rightful place in the mine with colleagues that mirror perfectly the composition of the general population. She'll thank you later.

Your previous point extolled opportunity over representation, but this comment seems to suggest that opportunity itself can sometimes be inappropriate, and hence harmful. Or have I misunderstood?

What I was lampooning is not simple opportunity, but downright manipulation, as benevolent as it may seem. That's the difference between allowing a child and encouraging/cajoling them to do something.

When you mount a huge campaign to get girls to code, even if they are not interested, are you doing the former or the latter? What about when you do the same for hiring more women in certain areas? Or for getting more women presenters in certain technical conferences?

And if we as a community decided that we should feel bad for being interested in things that overwhelmingly attract males, why not extrapolate the proposed solution? Maybe it gets absurd enough that we realize it's been wrong all this time.

> downright manipulation ... huge campaign ... get girls to code, even if they are not interested ... decided that we should feel bad ... things that overwhelmingly attract males ... why not extrapolate

That's an impressive amount of speculating.

> Maybe it gets absurd enough that we realize

Indeed.

> That's an impressive amount of speculating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Who_Code

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Girls_Code

https://www.womentechmakers.com/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-facebook-...

https://hackbrightacademy.com/about/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women

My apologies. I had assumed that what you were talking about had something to do with either Perl 6 or Camelia.

IHBT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stefantalpalaru

> Favorite moderator quote: dang, 12 Jul 2015: "Your account has violated the HN guidelines countless times, yet we've stopped short of banning you. We're not going to keep doing that. Kindly follow the rules from now on."

You haven't been trolled, you've been failed by your lack of control over your own emotions. Try using reason, next time when you're faced with an opinion you don't agree with.

You've slipped back into breaking the HN guidelines regularly. That's dismaying, since you did a fair job of eliminating this for a while. Please eliminate it.

I actually took my daughter mining: https://twitter.com/marshray/status/564981090218033152

It was great fun.

Uranium mining is seeing a boost as the prices rise after the last climate deal: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uranium-prices-idUSKBN0UB0...

Will you encourage her to pursue this and close the gender gap in the terribly sexist mining industry? Will you tell her that the high salary is worth the risk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Health_risks_of...

It sounds like you like Camelia but think the design goal is a mistake. Is that right?

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