Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage Earlier this month, Elizabeth Mattijsen, a Dutch software developer and contributor to the open-source Perl programming language, opened an issue in the GitHub Perl 6 repository seeking to rename the project because having "Perl" in the name is "confusing and irritating." To understand why that's so, it's necessary to know a …
Like the vicious foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of OO programming that suddenly seems to be filling my tech news feeds? I mean, sure let’s discuss shortcomings and failed promises of OO, but some of those seem to rank OO somewhere worse than genocide and child abuse and kicking puppies combined.
I thought Perl was just a wrapper to add functionality to regex, because you can't quite write a program just with a regex.
I'd not realised that Perl6 wasn't just a later version of Perl5. I've written one Perl program and I'd no idea what version. So I checked:
perl -v
This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 1 (v5.22.1) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
(with 73 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
Copyright 1987-2015, Larry Wall
Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit.
Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on
this system using "man perl" or "perldoc perl". If you have access to the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.
So the only issue is a new name for Perl6?
you can't quite write a program just with a regex
You can with the "extended regex" language popularized by Perl; it's Turing-complete.
(Real regular expressions are, of course, of the same formal power as deterministic finite automata and transition graphs. Whether a DFA constitutes a program depends on your definition of "program".)
I'm a big fan of and user of perl, because it lets me write code so clearly that people who see it ask what fancy mods I've made to their language of choice to make things so obvious. Enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot is a double-edged sword, and what people are really complaining about with perl is that some people think writing "line noise" code is job security for the sinecure-minded losers of the world, of which there are all too many.
But not everyone - I DO maintain and support my own code, which generally has more comments than code in the source, with the "why I did it this way" along with the "how". Because I forget and that's not language dependent at all - my arduino C/C++ looks very similar. And when I had coders working for me (in any language) if they didn't do the same, they got a talking to or terminated. And for some reason our consulting firm became so popular that when we all retired, the oldest of us was 45.
Because customers will pay for quality and the ability to modify quickly to suit, or at least we found a few that would.
=for smartpeople
That said, this new language currently known as perl 6 should no way be named perl, that's idiotic. It's really not even close to the same language - I've looked, I've paid attention for example to Damian etc - I'd go with his suggestion if for no other reason than he's generally the smartest guy in the room.
=cut
Perl and Javascript have that in common -- they're both expressive languages in which it's possible to write very clearly structured code, but they get a lot of hate because they don't *force* you to.
Perl in particular was designed for a wide variety of use cases, with a big one being short, simple programs for data transformation. When you're writing a one-liner you don't want a lot of syntactic sugar in the way. There *are* language constructs that were clearly a bad idea (the default argument comes to mind), but they're not mandatory.
As for the name...Perl++? ;)
I like the & for reasons perl programmers will know...Although some of the indirection syntax HAS improved with later versions.
To the poster one up - ask Larry - perl was written - and became the p in lamp stack for a long time - because it's the best duct tape there is out there. Using it for larger programs is tempting, and I've been tempted...and failed to resist, but that's getting outside the main intended use cases...it's a lot more useful than sed and awk as duct tape, and I even have it as fastcgis on raspberry pi servers around here.
As to javascript, it's (in my rarely humble opinion) mostly grown because what else got into all the browsers? It was like a weekend project, with design flaws to match. Uses beyond that I've seen seem terribly wasteful, and maybe we'll get some relief from JS in browsers...
There's a rather interesting interview out there with Guido and Larry that shows philosophy. Guido insists his way is best (maybe, for some things) and lays out the roads and rules and all that. Fine.
Larry's response was, well, we just built some of the buildings, and then built the roads after we watched everyone and saw where they walked anyway...
Here you go - this is a raw stream and I set this to skip nearly an hour of advertising and backpatting intro. Might be informative to those interested in language design philosphy and all the big guys (for scripting languages) are there. https://youtu.be/csL8DLXGNlU?t=3060
Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Larry Wall & Anders Hejlsberg
I'm upvoting for part of the comment, but the remark about use cases? No.
PERL was designed for one use case: turning logfiles into legible reports. Everything else was added to it because people who knew it for that purpose kept trying to use it for other things, rather than learning more appropriate languages.
(How do I know? I'd already been coding nearly twenty years when PERL was created.)
I'm retired, so no danger of me writing production code. I just tinker on my home systems. I write in C or Perl.
For utility scripts, I use Perl because I don't know shell syntax very well. But all my Perl looks like C, so that the structure of the code is obvious. Well, there's one compact and cryptic construction I've used more than once (I got it off the internet) which, with about 12 characters, reads and parses a text file of name-attribute pairs into an associative array.
My working career involved a lot of regexes, so I mostly get them right, but they're a bugger to debug if they don't work as planned.
"That said, this new language currently known as perl 6 should no way be named perl, that's idiotic. It's really not even close to the same language"
I was thinking maybe they could call it SWINE. Super Wide Information Notation Edition. They could cast some Perlisms into the front end.
But Version 10 would clash with the classic Perq computer! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ
So we have families of incompatible programming languages called BASIC, Algol, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Ruby, and Python. What to do about it?
"Pathological Eclectic Rubbish Lister" arouses negative feelings, so you would want to rename it to the much nicer 'Pearl' (like Ruby, it could be a gemstone or a lady's name), rather than 'Prul' (Dutch word), Peril, or Leper.
Perl has been my bread and butter for many years. Obviously I'm not well fed.
Waiting for an improvement in the language/interpreter for 10-20 years has led me to greener pastures where pythons may lurk. But never to those nourished by the redmond beasts.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Because, honestly, both suck. In different ways, though.
Want a simple, efficient and elegant programming language? C.
Perl, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, etc, two-mile long list of me too! languages. That's deffo not where simplicity and/or elegance are at.
It definitely seems like that to me as well. But programming is indeed an area that seems to attract lots of emotion from lots of people, so I'm not surprised that it is not that easy to change.
I am, however, surprised that the splinter team kept with the same name. I don't understand how they thought it would not be confusing given that they knew from the start that they would be creating something incompatible. I would have wanted a different name from the start.
By taking the Perl 6 moniker, whether intentionally or not the team made it nearly impossible to create a major revision to Perl 5. Instead the "original" Perl has been incrementally building out to the current 5.30.0 version. If the Rakudo/Camilia quit refering to themselves as Perl 6 then perhaps a proper successor to Perl 5 will be developed (Perl 7, Perl X?) and I won't have to explicitly declare features that have been around since Perl 5.10 (can you say "say").
"I am, however, surprised that the splinter team kept with the same name"
It was not their intention to deliver something so different from perl5, but feature creep and a commitment to get it right took the language down a very long path. The intent was to have the community adopt the changes provided by Perl6, but by the time there was product it had become a significant leap.
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