Re:Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what d...
by cutler on Monday February 06, 2017 @01:57PM
(#13582704)
Perl6 is not, IMHO, a completely different language and I can't understand why the Perl6 community beat this drum so hard. "use <version>;" "my" variables, context awareness, $@% variable identifiers, list emphasis. At the syntactic level Perl6 is very similar to Perl5. OK, it's OO under the hood, unlike Perl5. If it's a completely different language why name it Perl6?
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Re:Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what d...
by b2gills on Monday February 06, 2017 @02:28PM
(#13583014)
The OO part is actually one of the tiniest of changes. You can get basically the same thing in Perl 5 by using Moose.
It has signature, and subsignature parsing, built-in concurrency, not to mention over a dozen other features that are not in Perl 5. The main reason it is called Perl 6 is how the project began. It started out as Perl 5 minus a few warts.
As someone who well versed in both, they are very similar, and very different at the same time.
I like to categorize the differences like this:
Perl 4 is to C, as Perl 5 is to C++, as Perl 6 is to Haskell,Scheme,C#,D,Go,BNF...
That is Perl 6 brings in features from many diverse programming languages, and combines them in such a way that it feels like they have always belonged together.
Re:Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what d...
by cutler on Monday February 06, 2017 @06:59PM
(#13585618)
Perl was my goto language for over 10 years but I lost my patience with the Perl6 for Christmas meme around 2013 by which time Ruby was a much better proposition. If the Perl5 community had finally found a way to adopt a MOP they might have had a chance of competing with Ruby and Python. I also feel Perl might have had better adoption in web development if the community had rallied round Mojolicious instead of Catalyst. Catalyst's routing via subroutine signatures is an abomination.