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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

My point is that Perl 5 is still the most recent released version of Perl. Perl 6 is somewhere on the horizon (out there with Java 1.6 and C++ 0x). Even if Perl 6 gets released tomorrow, then what? Another decade and a half until Perl 7?

Nobody's going to wait around another 30 or 45 years for Perl to become the language it was meant to be, they'll move on long before then, if they haven't already.

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And Perl 5 will stay the most recently released version of Perl 5 (note the number). Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different languages of the same family. They forked roads but drive in the same direction.

Rakudo Star's third release is today.

(I'm not going to argue any silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!" because other people have no trouble building productive things with Rakudo, like they've done for the other two releases of Rakudo Star and the other thirty three releases of Rakudo.)

Does it support all of the perl6 spec?

Seems to support the vast majority of the spec: http://rakudo.de/ (something like 85% to 90% to my naked eye as at July).

And according to Rakudo status page (http://rakudo.org/status) below are the common things that don't quite work yet:

  * big integers
  * nested package/grammar/class declarations
  * typed arrays and attributes
  * state variables
  * multi-level wrapping
  * macros
  * threads/concurrency
  * longest-token matching
  * :dba adverb in regexes

So it is pretty usable... enough that even a static blogging app has been writen in Rakudo: http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/dog-food-with-a-distinct...

It may be usable, but my point was: you can't call something "complete" when it doesn't implement its own spec. Imagine telling your boss "Look, I've released this thing three times now! I know it's just now doing 85-90% of what you asked, but still, what is your problem?!".

When the spec itself is as feature rich as Perl 6 is, having an 80% complete implementation still accounts for a very usable, very feature rich language to play with and implement useful programs in.

It may be usable, but my point was...

... a silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!"

Are you suggesting there's a better approach to develop software than incremental delivery and design changes based on feedback from real users? That contradicts the experience of the people developing Perl 6, but I'm sure many of us would entertain contrary-but-concrete evidence.

Looks like my post really touched a nerve given your totally over the top characterization of it.

>Are you suggesting ...

No, I'm suggesting that when someone complains that they still can't use perl 6 after all these years it's dishonest and overly defensive to try and claim that an 80% release that's apparently been released multiple times makes their complaint a complaint of ignorance.

A more honest approach would be to respond "well, that's true but we're working on it and you can help by using what we have so far".

I'm suggesting that when someone complains that they still can't use perl 6 after all these years....

I don't read that in any sense in what you wrote before ("Perl 6 is somewhere on the horizon").

I don't know anyone's specific needs to deploy Perl 6 for Serious Production Code, but I do know that multiple implementations have been available for five and a half years such that anyone interested could evaluate its suitability and that the purpose of the Rakudo Star releases is to produce code usable for more and more people.

The Rakudo developers have never said that Rakudo Star was a complete implementation of the Perl 6 spec. They called it a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 (http://rakudo.org/node/75).

Anyway I'm a "glass is half full" type of person and I view the 85-90% has a good thing (and I think the "boss", ie. Larry Wall would agree :)

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