Re: Production Ready Perl 6?
On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:59:44AM +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote: I see things differently. I think that the question is Perl 6 production ready? is a meaningful and fairly important question. Can I reasonably expect to use Perl 6 in a production environment? The question has as much (or more) to do with implementations than the spec, but that doesn't make the question unimportant. I can use C90 and Fortran 95 in a production environment they are supported by stable, robust compilers that produce good quality code. I can use most of C99 and Fortran 2003 in production if I control the compiler. It is entirely legitimate to ask whether Perl 6 is ready for use in a similar sense. Is there at least one implementation that covers enough of Perl 6, with enough quality and speed, that one can reasonably expect it to work well in production? The feeling that I get from the discussions in this forum, and I mean no offence by this, is that people try to divert the question because they do not like the answer. If Perl 6 + implementations had a support comparable to C99 or Fortran 2003, I strongly suspect that most people would have answered with yes, it is production ready. I don't want to spam the list with my ramblings again, but you're absolutely correct, too. It's about perspective - Perl 6 to me is a magical project, and Perl 5 benefits from it all the time. I don't expect to have an industrial strength implementation from this unless development switches to a model similar to Perl 5 where the language is basically defined by a one-true Perl 6 interpreter - say, by forking the current Perl 5 framework and totally making it Perl 6 compliant. I see Perl 5 more like, say awk than Fortran or C. It's more a very powerful utility than a language per se. Perl 6 is trying to make Perl into a language with a spec that can be implemented by others, therefore most of the work is on the language design and learning how to implement it. Anything that comes out of this synergy isn't going to be any more production ready than Backus' first Fortran compiler was. I mention Fortran only because it's history and path to maturation is very well known. I also don't think any of this chicken little talk about Perl 5 falling out of favor is accurate. JavaScript is a different (and aweful) beast entirely, and the question of Perl 5 vs Perl 6 is left for another day because it's still apples and oranges. If you want to see an interpreter/language that has the very real potential to compete with all current dynamic, interpreted languages out there, particularly on many-core machines that *is* production ready, take a look at Qore.org. I've been following Perl 6 and Parrot since the beginning, and I am still interested in it's success as ever. However, I don't consider Perl 6 a new Perl anymore than I considered New Coke a rightful successor back in the day because a successor wasn't necessary. Maybe Perl 6 is more like Diet Coke, which is considered a closely related product that has it's own flavor and following - it's not really supposed to be a sugar free version of the real thing. That's my take on it. Cheers, Brett Daniel. On 11/22/2011 10:09 PM, B. Estrade wrote: Well said. Also, the OP shouldn't confuse Perl 5 (the interpreter-defined language) with Perl 6 (a language definition for interpreters/compilers). The latter benefits from the fact that Perl 5 is whatever perl says it is - for better or worse. So, asking if Perl 6 is production ready is like asking if HPF, C++11, ECMA-262 is production ready. It just doesn't make sense even if the spirit of the question is mostly understood to mean a production implementation. Language designing and drafting is a funny thing, and history is wrought with *many* very interesting languages being designed, but failing to gain enough traction to elicite a production or (fully implemented) compiler/interpreter. The exercise itself is still extremely valuable and beneficial to all involved. Brett On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 12:38:15AM +0400, Richard Hainsworth wrote: Yet again this thread starts up. Yet again it will end with no one changing their opinions, their expectations, or the time-span of their vision. Personally, I use perl6 in my professional analytical work. I can express solutions to problems elegantly and with a minimum of work. I am not entirely concerned with the speed for most things, but that is the nature of what I do. When I am concerned with speed, I fall back on perl5 and especially perl5 routines that interface to optimised libraries. But I am really frustrated when I go back to perl5 because it feels so clunky compared to perl6. Ruby and Python overtaking Perl? So what? Neither of them have as much coverage as javascript or java, and every time I have to deal with either of those, I recoil in loathing. Truly I just cannot see why they should have SO much attention. (No need for a flame war about javascript or
Re: Production Ready Perl 6?
LOL, I will take that one. :) I looked at all of those. My company uses Ruby so that is what i am going to work with at this time. I was leaning towards scala as well but heard good things about closure and it may fit my needs since i am looking for something that uses the java vm. - On Nov 23, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote: Hello Wendell, On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:26:48 -0700 Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net wrote: Thanks, so it isnt production ready like a release which would be an official release of a new version of perl 5? I have the feeling after well over 5 years this will never happened. I hope Perl 6 doesnt get seen as a novelty or toy and people simply never use it if this hasnt already happened. Ruby is passing Perl by like Python did. Ruby? That ancient, no-longer-hip thing? The hip people now use Node.js or Clojure. On AwesomeWM or xmonad. On Gentoo. Sorry, could not resist. Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html I’m not an actor — I just play one on T.V. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
Re: Production Ready Perl 6?
Am Mittwoch, den 23.11.2011, 17:21 +0100 schrieb Daniel Carrera: On 11/23/2011 02:58 PM, Richard Hainsworth wrote: Five years seem an eternity in the frenetic world of dot_coms and the like. But it is not a long time in other areas of human activity. Wanting perl6 to be finished will not help it happen. Nor will acidic comments. I appreciate this. To me it seems more like 10 years. In addition, let me say this. It has been over five years since perl6 was first mooted and progress has been slow. But slow progress and justifications for the slow progress are not excuses. Some things do take a long time. I might appreciate Perl 6 better if I understood this better. I am naive about language development, so I might be wrong in feeling that 11.5 years is a long time between the initial announcement and production implementations. I would guess that other languages like C, Java, Fortran and Python did not take 12 years from initial planning to full implementation. I think that it's a common misconception: a time-frame of 10-20 years for developing a new programming language is absolutely normal. * Take C for example: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html Its conception started in 1969 and after 4 years the essentials of modern C were complete but it was not portable (only the Unix kernel was written in it). I consider the real takeoff when C was made portable in 1977 and KR published in 1978 allowing a growth in usage in the 1980s. The standardisation only began in 1983 and ANSI 89 was released in 1989: It's 20 years after the initial start. Was C production ready in 1973, 1978 or 1989? The early adopter learned C at the end of the 1970s but most of the developers learned it in the 1980s even if the standardisation was not complete. * And for Java: Development started in 1991 with first release in 1995 but the but it was without just-in-time compilation. The takeoff came with Java 1.1 with just-in-time compilation in 1997-1998 and the real start with the integration of the Hotspot VM (initially developed for the Self programming language) fully complete in 2000 with the release of Java 1.3. The big growth took place in the 2000s. Some says that after 10 years even the specification is not set in stone: so what? It was also the case for C for example. Richard stated that the implementation of Rakudo started 5 years ago even if the design of Perl 6 started more than 10 years ago. Niecza started in 2009/2010, the first release of Niecza was done at the end of 2010 and is making good progress. Both Rakudo and Niecza are helping the specification to be refined. In the past, Pugs have helped a lot to improve the specification and was the real start of the now official test suite. ...but! but! Is Perl 6 a new programming language? ;) Well, it depends on your definition, etc... long thread argumentum ad Hitlerum 8] I don't believe in revolution, everything is evolution: Every new programming language is standing on the shoulder of giants. So have fun with learning something new and be the one who later will be able to say: I was an early adopter when Perl 6 was not broadly adopted. Ciao, Raphael. Cheers, Daniel.
Re: Production Ready Perl 6?
On Thu, 2011-24-11 at 12:43 +0100, Raphael Descamps wrote: I think that it's a common misconception: a time-frame of 10-20 years for developing a new programming language is absolutely normal. It's also worth looking at C++. This is a good reference: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/dne.html Stroustrup documented the adoption rate quite carefully. See p36: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf The table on p36 of the paper is also in the book. After 10 years C++ had 50,000 users. It's not the same as perl6 but it's worth comparing. Since C++ was originally built on C and perl6 is being built on parrot, a straight comparison of user counts is not completely valid. There's a bit more here: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html Specifically: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#invention All things considered, perl6 is doing ok. -- --gh
Re: Production Ready Perl 6?
Richard Hainsworth wrote: Five years seem an eternity in the frenetic world of dot_coms and the like. But it is not a long time in other areas of human activity. Indeed. To quote Alan Perlis, Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long? Perl 6 is nowhere near taking a century, but it is grand. And in fact Perl 6 is really three major projects, any one of which would reasonably take five years: the specification, the Parrot VM, and the Rakudo implementation. But of course, most people are not aware of how productive the last decade has been in terms of the spec and Parrot, they just know it hasn't produced /usr/bin/perl6. So I don't think progress has been that slow for three ambitious and mostly volunteer-run projects. Rakudo still has a few years to go before we can begin to worry about whether it will ever be production-ready. Some people might have given up on P6, but that makes up for the people who would have given up on a half-baked version if it had been released years ago. If it takes 15 years, Perl 6 is still going to be amazing, and that's why people will use it. For now, folks will continue to complain about the chronology; but when it arrives, they will care only about the amazingness. -David
