It doesn't befit the HN community to be ridiculing the Perl community.
First the Perl hackers were the original web start-ups. Many of the problems you don't have to worry about were either solved by them or were solved by people who wanted to fix things wrong with the Perl toolchain. This makes Perl a huge success in historical terms even if it on the wane today and, even if it is on the wane today, it is still used by many huge organisations.
The Perl 6 project has been a worthwhile and fascinating project to follow for the past 10 years. While many see it purely as a failure there is a lot to praise and learn from in the experiment. Here's what I have learned from watching it for most of the early years:
* Designing a new language by committee is very hard
* Keeping a community focused on creating a Minimal Viable Product can be very hard
* One bone-headed programmer can wreck a project
* Very clever people can make very stupid decisions, especially when operating in a group
* It is better to announce nothing than to announce and then not ship soon afterwards. The internet is like a child with ADHD
Having said all of that Perl 6 is working now and has some fascinating, innovative features if (to many people's taste) wrapped in some ugly and frenetic syntax.
Go read the history of Perl and Perl 6 before you just join the chorus of boots.
Especially the last two items. One being the list in the wrap-up: good advice and the other being the one about Leo—the man who single handily derailed Perl 6. One guy is pretty-much the reason we all laugh at Perl now. I watched it happen: he refused to build a MVP, he kept throwing away working code to re-architect it bigger and more convoluted ways. There's a big lesson there for every start-up.
If you do take a look be sure to read Dan's well-written blogs about language design and implementation, especially those tagged "What The Heck Is:"
I've always held a lot of respect and sadness for Dan Sugalski. The guy was not only a brilliant architect and hacker but he had the knack for always being right. It's sad that he didn't stand his ground and was sadly pushed out of the project. I get the impression he had some tough times after that.
If any of you guys see he CV come up you shouldn't think twice in giving him a senior role.
I remember reading Dan's blog religiously when I was a college student interested in language design and compiler implementation. That's where I learned about CPS and register VMs.
Anyway, I've seen him recently pop up in a professional context. I can't find anything on the Internet about where he's working now, so on the off chance he's deliberately protecting his privacy, I won't say where. But knowing what he's working on, I think he's doing fine.
Cool, thanks for those links. I'm going to give them a read.
After a quick read of a few articles....
Hmmm. This is good stuff. I want to sit down with this and read it on my Kindle. Maybe I should ping him and see if he wants to turn this in to a Leanpub book...
I think that's a great point about working towards a minimal viable product. I was shocked to read recently about all the wasted time spent doing things like implementing versions of Python and Javascript on Parrot instead of working to make happen its whole reason for existence, Perl 6.
I've just read that article and I feel there's a subtle re-writing of history going on there. I stopped following Parrot shortly after Dan Sugalski left (somewhere around 2005?).
I wasn't there before the original Parrot announcement but I did start lurking on the mailing list around 2001-2002.
I recall Parrot always being touted as an open VM for all dynamic languages (this is before dynamic languages started to appear on the Java VM). You have to put it in the context of the rumoured .Net VM that Microsoft was about to bring out—(and then did shortly after the Parrot project started to gain traction)—those of us interested in open software were keen to have our own.
Sadly Parrot stumbled and the rest is history. Mono wrote the obituary.
• The Perl 6 spec was still being argued about (plus I recall Larry had been seriously unwell).
• The intention was to create an open VM for all dynamic languages.
• Perl 5, Python, Ruby and Javascript were always targets for Parrot.
My frustration was that, instead of putting everything into creating usable Perl 5, Python and Ruby implementations (Javascript was pretty-much browser only at the time) the Parrot team faffed about with toy language after toy language.
I may have imagined this as I can't find reference to it online.
There are two Perl 6 compilers under active development. Rakudo is rather feature complete, but not very fast. Niecza is much faster, but still catching up on the features.
While I don't use them in production yet, they are very much fun to use.
It doesn't befit the HN community to be ridiculing the Perl community.
Dude!
As soon as you use the phrase "the language of the future", the mammalian-mating-ritual-inspired-games have begun!
Seriously. Different languages can and should talk about their appropriateness to different contexts. But "the future" isn't a particular context. It's more of a "I deserve more mindshare now!" statement. And while your special language might indeed deserve just that, you'll have to survive the charge of other long antlered types to prove it. Good luck in your quest but ridicule is part of the charge you'll have to survive after you enter this arena - stop frickin' whining it, just stop...
I think it's completely valid for a bunch of super-smart language geeks who have spent 10 years learning from their own mistakes to make comment on a new language, especially one that due to the backing of the biggest web company in the world will gain traction whether or not it it is any good.
Ad hominem, anyone? While "Perl" and language criticism in one headline might be worth a "teehee" moment, I fail to see any arguments in the article that seem to stem from the pedigree of the author. The only time he mentions Perl is when he's talking about threading, where there's some kind of feature parity – and he's not too happy about it.
Never mind that Perl hackers do have a certain penchant for language hacking (understandably…), starting with a plethora of object systems (Moose getting quite popular) and ending in extreme absurdity[1].
Hey, some Perl hackers are not business types working on serious software, but some of them are great hackers nonetheless ... it's also a good thing you haven't seen Damian Conway in a presentation talking about programming in a Klingon dialect. Your head might have exploded from the sheer absurdity of it - but me, I was standing there thinking about a time when programming was fun for me and I loved every second of it.
Also, calling an ad-hominem while insulting an entire community? Really?
Several of his arguments stem from his perl heritage. He gives a nod to moose's roles when complaining about Dart's weak OO (I actually agree with this one), advocates implicit conversions in stupid Perl-like ways, whines about + overloading in ways only a Perl user would, and relates Isolates to Perl's threads in ways that don't make sense based on my reading of the language spec (Perl's threads are way worse than what dart's seem to be!). Perl is directly visible in over half of his points! Some of his arguments are actually valid, but some obviously stem from his mind being corrupted from too much Perl use.
> Ad hominem, anyone? While "Perl" and language criticism in one headline might be worth a "teehee" moment
And my comment was just that: a "teehee" moment.
Oh, and "ad hominem" means "against a person". I only pointed to the irony of future-language advice coming from the Perl camp, never said anything against the validity of said advice or the person giving it.
Note that I didn't reply to your original post. While one might argue whether this really is irony or just a tired "haha, Perl" joke (or about the applicability of ad hominem by association), I was referring to the more immediate "envy" issue. Not that I don't regret posting, as I don't think digressing in this direction is worth a discussion here – although that would've taken place without my contribution.
"Perl, right, yafeelme?" is basically the "What's the deal with airline food?" of the programming world…
