HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

Ovid

no profile record

Submissions

Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

github.com
619 points·by Ovid·7 jaar geleden·439 comments

comments

Ovid
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I've tried to push entity-component-systems (ECS) for non-game applications. A financial company in London took that advice to manage the complexity of their system since it was such a good fit.

For those who are curious, here's a very brief introduction to ECS: https://dev.to/ovid/the-unknown-design-pattern-1l64
Ovid
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
This was brought up a few times. There were several issues with that approach.

* `bless` and `class` aren't topologically equivalent: you can't twist and warp one into the other

* We've seen small, incremental steps get beaten to death by bike-shedding every step

* Sometimes it's hard to see the big picture when you're looking at the individual details

It's that first point that's really the killer here. Perl used `bless` and `@ISA` ("we have methods" and "here's where to find them") and that was all.

You want state? Figure it out.

You want encapsulation? Figure it out.

You want to work around MRO bugs? Figure it out.

You want to know if something in the symbol table is a subroutine or a method? Figure it out.

You want composition? Figure it out.

Much of what we wanted just couldn't be easily done building on a broken foundation, but there's so much excellent work out there which already solves these problems for class-based OO, we decided to take advantage of what others have already learned.
Ovid
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
And in the new class syntax, when it's done, that's (roughly):

    class Point {
        field $x :param :reader;
        field $y :param :reader;

        method as_string() {
            return "($x,$y)";
        }
    }
    my $origin = Point->new( x => 0, y => 0 );
    say $origin->as_string;
I know which of the two I'd rather write :)

The main limitation is that we don't have the `isa => 'Int'` check. That's largely because adding types is something for the entire language, not just this new syntax, so it had to be delayed.
Ovid
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
> A senior member of Ethiopia's media accused Facebook of “just standing by and watching this country fall apart”.

Why the hell does one company get hold so much power in the world? More to the point, why does Mark Zuckerberg, an apparently immoral man-boy, get to make decisions like this?

Remember when Myanmar used Facebook to coordinate/incite genocide? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Or when Facebook was being used in Kenya to orchestrate vigilante murders? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47805113

Or how about when Zuckerberg refused to introduce any controls to livestreaming after the New Zealand mosque massacre was livestreamed? https://www.thewrap.com/mark-zuckerberg-defends-facebook-liv...

Facebook only reluctantly banned white supremacists groups. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-bans-white-n...

Or how about in 2016 when a young man's murder was livestreamed and Facebook refused to take down the stream "because it doesn't violate the company's community standards." https://money.cnn.com/2016/06/17/technology/facebook-live-sh...

How the hell did we get into such a dystopian hellscape where one company so brazenly, openly, supports evil? Cyberpunk as a genre is dead because it's no longer fiction.
Ovid
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Oh, that is a long and complicated story.

Perl 6 was announced a long time ago, but it took many years of development and planning and I (like others) used to joke that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be written in Perl 6. And then we got egg on our face when Duke Nukem Forever was released first. (And it turned out to be a turkey).

However, many clients I spoke to at that time were telling me they wouldn't upgrade their Perl code because they were waiting for the new version ... which was seemingly never going to arrive. Worse, it became clear that Perl 6 was a new language, with common roots, but it wasn't like the Python 2/3 split: a wholesale rewrite of code would be necessary, or try to use a Perl 5 compatibility mode that may or may not have proven useful.

So companies weren't upgrading, Perl developers were fighting, people were leaving the community and the Osborne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) could be renamed the Perl 6 Effect (I'm aware that the Osborne Effect is more complicated than it's often portrayed).

Worse, Perl 5 couldn't upgrade to Perl 6 because that version number was taken. Perl looked, to the outside world, like it wasn't upgrading any more. I even had one guy screaming at me at a Linux Conference about how Perl is shit, hadn't updated in 20 years, and ticked off a bunch of "facts" about Perl, most of which were objectively incorrect at the time, but Perl could no longer get its message out.

There was discussion about leap-frogging the version number and going straight for Perl 7, but that caused even more fights, more people dropping out of the community, and we fractured. We tried saying "the name of the language is Perl 5 and we're upgrading every year—we're currently on version 34—but that didn't satisfy anyone, either.

Eventually, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku (http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-...) and that freed us to upgrade our version number, but to what? Sawyer X, the former Perl Pumpking (development manager) proposed the Perl 7 project, but for many reasons, that also caused much anger.

So today, we have Perl. There are ideas of moving to Perl 7, but much work needs to be done. My Corinna OOP project is likely part of that work and the Perl Steering Committee has met with me to say they'd like Corinna in core, but slowly, step-by-step, to ensure that we don't push too much into the core and make mistakes we can't easily back out of.

I have more ideas about what is needed to get to Perl 7, but they'll largely wait until after Corinna is in core and fleshed out. It's a lot of work and the team working on Corinna (making great suggestions and also helping me not make boneheaded errors), have put in a lot of effort to create something we can turn into a proper RFC. Paul Evan's Object::Pad (https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad) is a testbed for many of these ideas.

So, we're getting there, but slowly. However, it appears to be moving along more smoothly than other efforts in the past. The fact that the goal is more modest helps.
Ovid
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Yes, late December, 1987, after the events I describe. It was released on Usenet, as I recall. I didn't even know what Usenet was back then. For me, it was pretty exciting to dial up a BBS, crash their software, and read through the code that the BBS was written in (and later contact the sysop to tell them how to replicate it).

I doubt I could have even compiled the software onto a COCO 2 computer.
Ovid
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Well, duh :) Perl's still more popular than people think. I saw on the Board of Directors for the Perl foundation for years, regularly speak at conferences for it, have released tons of open-source software for it, and currently am working on the Corinna project to improve the core OOP for the language: https://github.com/Ovid/Cor

Given that this site, like so many others, is to help me get work, I think it's natural I'd use Perl in my examples.
Ovid
·7 jaar geleden·discuss
Red looks interesting. Though I don't like the mapping of tables to "model". In general, I find that a model should be a consumer of an ORM, not the ORM itself. Otherwise, you expose to much to the business layer and it's harder to refactor.

For example, if you have a column on table A and you later need to move that to table B, a clean model can encapsulate that change. Hard to do when the ORM is being treated directly as the model.
Ovid
·7 jaar geleden·discuss
I get hired all the time to fix legacy systems in Perl or to build new systems in Perl.

We're still out there, but it's not "cool" to talk about.
Ovid
·7 jaar geleden·discuss
The https://taustation.space/ game runs great on Perl 5, but yes, with a robust Perl 6, many things would have been easier to implement. But by "robust" I don't mean just the language—I also mean the ecosystem.

There is no DBIx::Class (or related schema loader) for Perl 6. I don't know how mature the web frameworks are. Or even basic stuff like Excel reader/writers (we use lots of Excel for backend data analysis).

On the other hand, most of the async stuff we currently use can be thrown out. With raku's gradual typing, our in-house type libraries can be tossed out. Our local modules for making it easier to write clean procedural and OO code could be thrown out.

And the raku code would be far more concise and easy to read. Here's a simple Point object in Moose:

    package Point {
        use Moose;
        use overload '""' => \&Str, fallback => 1;
        use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;
        subtype "PointLimit" => as 'Num'
            => where   { $_ >= -10 && $_ <= 10 }
            => message { "$_ must be a Num between -10 and 10, inclusive" };

        has [qw/x y/] => (
            is       => 'rw',
            isa      => 'PointLimit',
            required => 1,
        );

        sub Str {
            my $self = shift;
            return sprintf "[%f,%f]" => $self->x, $self->y;
        }
    }

raku:

    class Point {
        subset PointLimit of Rat where -10.0 .. 10.0;
        has PointLimit $.x is rw is required;
        has PointLimit $.y is rw is required;
    }
And for those who don't "grok" the above, here it is in Python 3, just so you can see how clean raku's OO syntax is:

    class PointLimit:
        def __init__(self, name):
            self.name =  name
        def __get__(self, point, owner):
            return point.__dict__.get(self.name)
        def __set__(self, point, value):
            if not -10 < value < 10:
                raise ValueError('Value %d is out of range' % value)
            point.__dict__[self.name] = value

    class Point:
        x = PointLimit('x');
        y = PointLimit('y');

        def __init__(self, x, y):
            self.x = x
            self.y = y

        def __str__(self):
            return "[%f,%f]" % (self.x, self.y)
Ovid
·7 jaar geleden·discuss
This has been a huge deal for the Perl community.

First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5.

But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor.

Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" for Perl 6 was created, but that didn't seem to help.

Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way.

If I had my choice, I'd program in raku because it's a lovely language addressing many pain points (including being one of the few dynamic languages with a working concurrency model). But it's not adopted widely enough yet for that to happen. Time will tell ...