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Chromatic: Goodnight, Perl6Chromatic: Goodnight, Perl6Posted Feb 14, 2013 11:47 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)In reply to: Chromatic: Goodnight, Perl6 by raiph Parent article: Chromatic: Goodnight, Parrot
As to whether Perl6 is released: I guess I'll believe it when someone on slashdot writes "Perl 6 finally out", with the obligatory jokes about Duke Nukem Forever and "at least it reached 1.0 before GNU Hurd did". (N.B.: By 1.0 I mean "the first release wide number of people would consider production ready with no obvious shortcomings".)
As to the question about role, people with Unix heritage are likely to be quite resistant to anything that needs a JVM to run, so that makes Perl 6 unusable for traditional sysadmin tasks where Perl 5 was clear upgrade from bash, awk, sed, etc. I personally appreciate the idea of using JVM, because one really good thing about java is that there's a ton of good libraries written for this language, so that would immediately seed a pretty big "JPAN" for Perl 6. However, in order to *really* benefit from that, the usage of those classes should be as transparent and easy as humanly possible. And of course it requires an IDE that is capable of handling Perl6 while completing java types and method arguments... With 6, is it still true that only perl can parse Perl?
You see, I've griped before about Perl 6's reprogrammable syntax, or about overly complex syntaxes in general. It makes it hard for tools to work out what to autocomplete, where syntax errors are if the expression is not valid, etc. Of course, with reprogrammable syntax I guess any hope for parsing anything is lost unless your parser happens to be a Perl 6 compiler.
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Chromatic: Goodnight, Perl6 Posted Feb 15, 2013 0:23 UTC (Fri) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]
> people with Unix heritage are likely to be quite resistant to anything that needs a JVM to run
Perl 6 does not need a JVM to run.
I agree that many who might accept a technically adequate Rakudo/Parrot might balk at a technically adequate Rakudo/JVM that was (perceived to be) proprietary.
> I personally appreciate the idea of using JVM
There will likely soon be a Rakudo/JVM.
> one really good thing about java is that there's a ton of good libraries written for this language, so that would immediately seed a pretty big "JPAN" for Perl 6. However, in order to *really* benefit from that, the usage of those classes should be as transparent and easy as humanly possible.
Rakudo/JVM is supposed to just be a stepping stone to A) completion of the Perl 6 spec (in particular concurrency) and B) porting to other backends. It's not necessarily interesting to jnthn (the guy doing the port) beyond these short term roles. But you're right that it may get more interesting than that. We'll see.
> With 6, is it still true that only perl can parse Perl?
From a theoretical perspective, the situation is basically the same. (Perl 6 has gone further down this road, with features like lisp-style macros that mean that Perl 6, just like Perl 5, just like lisps, just like haskell with Template Haskell, theoretically isn't parseable without a full language implementation.)
From a practical perspective, the situation is much better. One shift is what Larry Wall has phrased as "only Perl 6 can parse Perl 6". Note the extra capital 'P', reflecting the fact that Perl 6 is a specification not an implementation which makes a big practical difference. Another is that Perl 6 is a much more regular language than Perl 5.
Also see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5916194/can-only-perl6...
> Of course, with reprogrammable syntax I guess any hope for parsing anything is lost unless your parser happens to be a Perl 6 compiler.
Heh. You've let theory overrun your sense of pragmatics.
(Quick test. Perl 6 contains a function is-prime that will occasionally return the wrong answer. Does that make it useless?)
Rob Hoelzro has written a syntax highlighter in python. As far as I know it works without errors on everything that's been thrown at it.
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