LWN: Comments on "Perl 6 renamed to Raku"

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

flussence — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 06:34:02 +0000

I'm not sure that kind of bitterness-driven development is sustainable. The best outcome is that a fork takes over, a la LibreOffice, otherwise it'll have a chronically low bus factor (currently 1).

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Cyberax — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 20:42:47 +0000

> This would mean fully automated and extensible resource release management and full support for closures.
Uhh... Perl 5 doesn't really have fully automated resource release management?

Perl 6 of course has closures.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

naptastic — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 03:03:35 +0000

> Perl 5 + Perl 6 obviously results in Perl 11

/usr/local/bin/perl on my systems is Perl 11.

http://perl11.org/cperl/STATUS.html

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

rweikusat2 — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 14:27:39 +0000

I was referring to "looking at the language and its implementation in order to determine if I would want to use it instead of Perl 5 for new developments". There are plenty of areas where Perl 5 would warrant improvement, eg, multithreading or exception handling, but a replacement would still need to have an implementation which at least provides all the benefits the Perl 5 implementation does. This would mean fully automated and extensible resource release management and full support for closures.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Cyberax — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 23:29:48 +0000

Perl 5 is basically a legacy, kinda like Fortran or AWK. It does what it needs to do, but almost no new significantly-sized code is written in them. So they don't need replacement, they're fine as is.

Replacing Perl 5 would have required recreation of all of the Perl 5's quirks, and nobody really wants that.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

rweikusat2 — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 17:31:09 +0000

Evaluating Perl 6 "by its merits" resulted in me coming to the conclusion that it's not suitable to replace Perl 5 and won't ever be.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Wol — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 23:50:12 +0000

Well, we have english_GB, scots_GB, gaelic_GB, cornish_GB, scouse_GB, geordie_GB, etc etc.

To make matters worse, English is the language of the Saxon south, Scots is the language of the Anglish north, and Gaelic the language of the Scottish west.

Cornish and Welsh, I believe, are the "original" British language, predating the Saxons and Romans. (A Welshman was originally a pre-Saxon inhabitant anywhere in the country.)

And Scouse and Geordie are quite likely the remnant of the Viking/Norse invasions of middle Britain.

Cheers,
Wol

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

smitty_one_each — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 23:25:45 +0000

Rewarding another knowledgeable user.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

mpr22 — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 22:05:47 +0000

Not particularly more so than ur-PK and hi-IN, or hbs-BA and hbs-HR, or fr_FR and fr_CA.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

flussence — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 21:21:45 +0000

Try using en_GB subtext to communicate with people who only understand en_US and see how far that gets you…

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

jwilk — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 18:31:40 +0000

u"" was added in 3.3

b""%() was added in 3.5

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

mgedmin — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 16:16:20 +0000

Python tried to mandate a full upgrade. It didn't work.

The Python community found ways of writing to the common language subset so the same codebase runs with both Python 2 and 3, with no unreliable automatic translation tools like 2to3. Python eventually gave up and started adding syntax features back to make that easier (like u'' literals in Python 3.2 or was it 3.3, %-formatting for bytestrings in 3.4 or was it 3.5?).

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

smurf — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 16:14:08 +0000

Probably not. But you might ask somebody form Brazil whether pt_BR is a different language than pt_PT.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

pizza — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 11:58:06 +0000

heh, there are a lot of folks that would say that 'en_GB' is actually several languages..

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

jond — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 10:17:41 +0000

is en_US a different language to en_GB?

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

sorpigal — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 22:36:59 +0000

Fairness here is "an evaluation on its own merits" rather than being ignored by people who see Perl and think they know what it is.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

mpr22 — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 22:05:33 +0000

Mostly ones operated by computer preservation enthusiasts.

Nethack 3.4 (2002) still had (probably bitrotten in practice) support for *first edition* K&R C compilers, such as versions 2.2 and earlier of the VAX VMS C compiler.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

apoelstra — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 21:46:14 +0000

> This is very true. For anyone looking for a good example of this, the NetHack developers (yes, they still exist) included the following in the 3.6.2 release notes (May 2019):

> > Starting with the next major release, we will start using ANSI C features; which ones have yet to be determined. If you are actively running NetHack on a system that cannot handle full ANSI C, please let us know some details and we _might_ be able to accommodate you.

I'm curious what systems today support K&R C but not ANSI C. I imagine that K&R is supported by a strict subset of ANSI-supporting systems.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

flussence — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 20:21:19 +0000

Do you have a function besides sociopathy in internet comments? I took a look at some of your other LWN contributions to try and figure out who kicked your dog, but all I found was a fifteen year history of you being incredibly bitter toward a wide range of projects that went on to succeed.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

NYKevin — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:51:57 +0000

> look at original Unix: is that *really* the same language as modern C? it's written astoundingly differently

This is very true. For anyone looking for a good example of this, the NetHack developers (yes, they still exist) included the following in the 3.6.2 release notes (May 2019):

> Starting with the next major release, we will start using ANSI C features; which ones have yet to be determined. If you are actively running NetHack on a system that cannot handle full ANSI C, please let us know some details and we _might_ be able to accommodate you.

NetHack's codebase, in general, is quite horrifying if you're used to "modern C." It is thoroughly and unrepentantly procedural, freely mixes UI and business logic, uses K&R-style function declarations (the same release notes state that they will stop doing this in the next version), etc.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

adobriyan — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 18:42:12 +0000

Rust awaits kernel usage.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

deepfire — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:05:19 +0000

> Perl 6 is a great, concurrency and object focused language that could more than hold its own against the node's and other use-cases of today, but hasn't gotten a particularly fair shake.

Oh, but what is the concept of fairness in the space of language popularity?

There are many interesting languages out there.. And then there are those, that people use.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

rweikusat2 — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:33:31 +0000

> I read upgrading Perl 5 code to the new language is not feasible in real life cases.

Not really. Eg, Perl 5 uses "funny characters" partly in a way similar to articles in natural languages, with @ denoting a plural and $ a singular. In practice, this means that @a is an array, $a[0] is the first element of this array, @a[0 .. 4] is a slice composed of the first five elements and $a[0 .. 4] is a weird way to refer to $a[1] (in scalar context, the range operator, .., evaluates to 0[*] or 1 depending on whether the first or the second argument has a value which is regarded as true). TLFKAP6 uses @ and $ as namespace separators for arrays and scalars, with @a being an array and @a[0] being the first element of it. This means someone has to go through the code and change an open-ended number of $ to @ depending on what it's supposed to be and each of these changes has to be tested somehow in order to determine if the code still works. This is obviously doable but technically pointless for working code and possibly a lot of work.

[*] It really returns an undefined value which will be autoconverted to 0 or an empty string if either a number or a string was called for (possibly emitting a warning in some subset of the possible use cases of this if this has been enabled).

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

nix — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 11:32:42 +0000

I'd say Python 3 was properly named. It's a compatibility break, which means a new major version if you're using anything like semantic versioning; but it's not a major change to the feel of the language. Raku, on the other hand, is wildly different from Perl 5, at least as different as C++ is from C: a relative, but definitely not the same language.

The boundaries between a compat break and a new language are necessarily fuzzy, and indeed can even run in unexpected directions (look at original Unix: is that *really* the same language as modern C? it's written astoundingly differently). But I'd say that neither of these cases are really debatable. Python 3 is not a new language. Raku is, developed by evolution from Perl.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

wodny — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 11:00:14 +0000

Is Python 3.5 a different language than 3.4 as well? It got async/await syntax.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

mirabilos — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:36:19 +0000

Still a different language.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

nilsmeyer — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 07:36:39 +0000

Perly McPerlface?

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

niner — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 06:44:18 +0000

Well at least Perl 5 and Raku have good interoperability, so it's quite possible to mix them in real life code bases and use that to port piece by piece, unlike Python which mandated a full upgrade of the whole code base including all its dependencies at once.
https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Inline::Perl5:cpan:NINE

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

dgm — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 06:43:06 +0000

Perl Is Mostly Perl

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

bmork — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 06:34:57 +0000

It's more like PIMP - Perl is modern Perl

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

edomaur — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 06:00:46 +0000

Well, it is not. Python 3 is clearly a development on the Python 2 grammar, which is not the case for Raku and PHP6

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

jccleaver — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 02:02:39 +0000

> I read upgrading Perl 5 code to the new language is not feasible in real life cases. So it's better not to confuse the bigger audience by reusing the name.

It's not that it's not feasible, and perl 6 retains much perl 5 compatibility, it's that the design goals and community have changed sufficiently that both sides needed freedom to define their own futures. It's really the classical best-reason for a corporate breakup or spin-off.

Perl 6 is a great, concurrency and object focused language that could more than hold its own against the node's and other use-cases of today, but hasn't gotten a particularly fair shake.

Perl 5 (a.k.a. "perl") is as useful as it ever was and has been adding plenty of features and improvements over the years (including backporting many of the most useful features from the perl 6 design), but has been constricted by it being seen as a dead-end, maintenance branch for "the future of perl" despite the work.

Although there have been strong opinions, IMO this really is the best for both sides of the community. The only hope is that it's not too late for either side to mount a strong path forward.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

geuder — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:33:43 +0000

I read upgrading Perl 5 code to the new language is not feasible in real life cases. So it's better not to confuse the bigger audience by reusing the name.

For Python 2 -> 3 it's much more doable.

Disclaimer: I am not a Perl programmer, it's been years I was last forced to dig into some code. Well founded opinions welcome!

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

clopez — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 23:47:10 +0000

GNU-PNR

(GNU is Not Unix - Perl is Not Raku)

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

mirabilos — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 23:17:52 +0000

Nice!

The Raku people realised they are a completely new language; the PHP people surprisingly got a clue, threw away PHP 6 and based PHP 7 on PHP 5… only the Python people insist that py3k is not a new language ☹

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

clugstj — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 22:09:53 +0000

Grasping at relevance.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

flussence — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 21:25:55 +0000

Existing consensus is Perl 5 will be renamed to the "version %d" already displayed in `perl -v`. Expect the next version to be Perl 32 (and expect ignorant hecklers to misinterpret *that* as "not 64-bit").

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

niner — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 20:44:34 +0000

Because so many people didn't realize that Raku is a completely new language. They just heard "Perl", thought of the horrors that were created during the 1990s dot com boom and never even looked at the language. Also having that number as part of the language name, when it looks sooo much like a version was very confusing. And it blocked Perl 5 from ever progressing beyond that version. And....a couple other reasons.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

nix — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 20:27:52 +0000

Of course, that's pronounced "Throatwobbler Mangrove", which is actually less silly a name than some of the suggested new names for Perl 6. :)

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

atai — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 20:17:38 +0000

Should have considered PINP, Perl is not Perl