Hacker News Reader

Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

I spent a huge amount of time in my 20's writing Perl 4 & 5 scripts. Even though I no longer use Perl, I still feel nostalgic about it.

That said, I can't find any reason to pick up Perl 6 and start learning it. With so many other useful and interesting languages out there: Python, Elixir, Elm, Rust, etc... what appeal should Perl 6 have to the masses these days?

Is anyone jumping into Perl 6 like they did with Ruby a decade ago and saying, "Wow, programming just got fun again"?

I'd love to see a Perl 6 breakthrough, but honestly it feels like those attempts to keep BeOS going... too little, too late. Its time has passed.

View on HN

Actually, I've been looking at Perl 6 and I think it's quite amazing. It's really the only language outside those I get paid to work with that I've considered doing a deep dive on.

I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story.

For example can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars in Python, Ruby, Groovy etc?

Also, https://modules.perl6.org/ seems to be growing.

> I'm not really understanding the lack of love for Perl 6 unless it's from folks that have invested careers in Perl 5 and are miffed by the compatibility story.

I think far more likely is the people that have decided to dislike "Perl" are letting their prejudice leak.

Perl 5 is one of those languages that is hides complexity, partially by accident. I'm sure a lot of people have looked at Perl and been unable to figure out what's going on, and why the same function returns different values sometimes when called with the same arguments[1], and not known what to make of it because many things work exactly as expected, especially for people familiar with C. This can be confusing to people that thought they were getting a handle on the language. The conclusion then is either they are failing to understand the language, or the language sucks. I imagine one choice is easier on the ego than the other.

1: Context. People skimp on the reading or targeted learning and context bites them in the ass, even if it's fairly simple once known.

> can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars in Python, Ruby, Groovy etc?

Those language grammars, if they've been properly implemented, could be the Perl 6 killer feature if well promoted. It could even lead to a sudden fall in brogrammers using regexes to parse html.

Looking at the ranking of those languages you mentioned on Tiobe, i.e. Python (4.7%), Ruby (2.4%) and Apache Groovy (0.3%), I guess if Python 3 took the initiative and implemented them, that would work as well.

Nice that you mention "deep dive". :-) https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/perl-6-deep...

Perl 5 is still as fun as ever. And newer things like Mojolicious keeps adding to the goodness.

Yes, Perl 5 is still fun, but I really like the chaining and FP in Perl 6, much like autobox but native. And native sets, rational number math instead of floating point math, the ability to use huge numbers without BigNum and lots of other awesoneness.

The top three Perl 6 features that make me say "Wow, programming is fun" are grammars, concurrency and gradual typing. There are many other features that also make Perl 6 a joy to use.

Ruby has replaced Perl for me as that get-things-done scripting language on the system. It would be weird to go back especially now that Ruby has the right ecosystem and fairly good backwards compatibility.

Ruby is both clean, expressive, has proper OO features and not it's not that alien from Perl. It feels a bit sluggish though, although to a lesser extent since 2.3. Perl 6 is slower for command line scripts anyway.

it is a really interesting language, in the sense of having many unique and unusual features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com