Re^2: RFC: (DRAFT Tutorial) A Gentle Introduction to Perl 6

[TGI]

Your thesis not new, however it is not entirely without merit. Yes Perl6 is still not at 1.0. Yes, perl 5.10 languished for an extended time, seemingly unmaintained at a critical time in the development of the dynamic web.

Whatever. Those decisions were made and those actions were taken by people doing what they thought was the best thing to do at the time. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe they were right. Maybe somewhere in-between... One thing is certain, stuff happened, it is in the past and won't change.

As to your criticism that Perl6 has no merits or particular strengths beyond Perl5, I can only assume that you have read only this example of Perl6. Had you read any of the excellent, rapidly evolving docs at http://doc.perl6.org, you would realize that Perl6 has some really nice features.

I've been barely dabbling in Perl6 for a few months, and the things that stand out to me are:

• Lazy lists - when combined with nice list comprehension syntax and metaoperators you have immense expressive power.
• Gradual typing - be strongly typed or be dynamic without having to mess about with templates.
• UTF8, I hate it, but Perl6 does it well.
• Concurrency - Perl6 promises, channels and supplies combine with auto-threaded list filters make parallel programming much easier.

On the down side:

1. it really is a new language and a big one
2. Holy crap, there are a billion operators
3. What slurps where and when?
4. occasional bits don't work as documented, or are only documented in a Synopsis.
5. Rakudo codebase is moving really fast. Of course that velocity is a sign that Christmas may actually happen this year.

I suggest you actually give Perl6 a real try.

[Ravenhall]

<Bad imitation of Ballmer> Concurrency, concurrency, concurrency!

Or to say it a different way: Promises, Channels, Supplies.

Seriously though, if the ease of concurrent programming doesn't wet your whistle, I don't know what will.

As Lavar Burton so famously said: "But you don't have to take my word for it":

1. http://www.jnthn.net/papers/2013-yapceu-conc.pdf
2. https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/asynchronous-programming-promises-and-channels/
3. http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2014/08/try-rakudobrew-and-play-with-concurrency.html