Re: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018

[Laurent_R]

but where does Perl really shine these days? That goes equally for the more conventional Perl 5 as well as the newer Perl 6.

It seems that nobody has really answered this question with respect to Perl 6. Let me try to give a few very brief answers on that part of the question.

Perl 6 has these to offer:

• It is a clean, modern, multi-paradigm language; it offers procedural, object-oriented and functional methodologies;
• Runtime optimization of hot code path;
• Malleable language, with the possibility to define functions, operators, traits and data types (adding a new operator is as simple as writing a subroutine);
• Improved, cleaner (and composable) regexes and built-in grammars (Perl 6 programs are compiled using a Perl 6 grammar);
• Lazy evaluation and infinite lists;
• Very powerful and high-level concepts for concurrency, parallelism and asynchronism for optimal use of multicore or multi-CPU architectures;
• Gradual typing, function signatures (including positional and named parameters), optional argument type-checking and subroutine multiple dispatch (based on signatures);
• a very powerful object model, with classes, roles, inheritance, subtyping, code reuse, introspection capabilities and meta-object programming;
• Powerful metaoperators and hyperoperators for applying code to lists of items;
• Unmatched unicode support;
• excellent interoperatibility with other languages such as Perl 5 (making it possible to use Perl 5 CPAN modules), Python and C (and others);

[pwagyi]

Perl6 looks like a language that has almost everything (ruby, python have), functional/OOP, meta programming, etc.

I really wish Perl 6 takes off.

[Crosis]

I've seen what can be done with the inline modules even in Perl 5. It gives me something to think about.

[syphilis]

I've seen what can be done with the inline modules even in Perl 5

XS and Inline::C (which is essentially the same) are things that I find very attractive about perl 5, as accessing C routines by writing perl programs is far more appealing than accessing C routines by writing C programs.
Of course, other languages also provide interfaces to C but I don't know how they compare with perl's C interface as I've not yet felt the need to investigate the alternatives.

Cheers,
Rob

[Crosis]

That I'm aware of, there's Cython and there's also a Scheme dialect called Chicken that compiles to C.

[Jenda]

• We apparently use a different definition of the word clean.
• While still being way slower than anything else.
• In combination with it's "clean" syntax, deceptively at the first glance kinda similar to another, older and well known language, this is bound to lead to impossible to decipher code.
• While being an overkill most of the time and another ad hoc change from things people know, but with \d still matching insanely way too much.
• Yeah, that's nice. If done right.
• Aaaand ... the design is finally stable and ... erm ... implemented?
• mkay
• And there's maybe five people that understand it all.
• With lovely line noisy syntax