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montroser 19 minutes ago [-]
Makes sense to split the foundation, as the communities have split (and withered).
From its inception Perl 6 was an incredible journey that resulted in a genuinely weird and interesting new programming language, and squandered a broad wealth of momentum and good will and enthusiasm from the Perl community at large. It was a dramatic slow death over the course of a decade, where people who had built their careers, and small and large companies who had built their economic engines on Perl got to come to the realization that the whole thing was over, killed somewhat inadvertently by its own creator...
stakhanov 2 hours ago [-]
What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy, and they now came along and said: "Listen up, everybody! We finally did it! It has a 16 bit processor now instead of 8 and 4 bit shades of green instead of 2, but it won't play any of your GameBoy games; you'll have to write new ones." -- If they did that, then being a hobby for a small number of true weirdos is the only way they could hope to fit into 2026. That's what Raku feels like to me.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
> What if it had taken Nintendo 35 years to release the next GameBoy
More like Nintendo took 35 years to release the "VideoGameGirl", a product with a completely different name, and then suddenly a bunch of die-hard GameBoy fans are complaining that this separate product, even if it shares origin with the GameBoy, somehow doesn't even run games made for a different console.
That's how this Perl/Raku navelgazing feels like to me.
librasteve 1 hours ago [-]
well the whole point of the rename is to sidestep the Perl vs. Raku navelgazing
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed, but I guess the Perl/Raku haters don't have anything of actual meat in their complaints, so off bike-shedding about the most trivial shit we go.
stakhanov 26 minutes ago [-]
> Perl/Raku haters don't have anything of actual meat in their complaints
For a random complaint of mine (one of many) see [1]. Using Perl as my main programming language for 3.5 years has given me plenty of "meat" to throw around; I just don't want to bore people with it, nor do I want to re-live the trauma.
Larry Ellison should buy it, then there would be no need for technical arguments any more, just like Java. You could just say "lawnmower" to end the debate on ethical grounds.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
Not everything needs to be a mainstream movement, and not being one doesn’t automatically make you a “true weirdo”.
stakhanov 1 hours ago [-]
Not everything, but languages do serve a purpose tied to how many (and which) people speak them, and that's true for general purpose programming languages in the same way as for human languages. If learning Klingon is someone's "thing" then, well, everyone can judge for themselves whether the predicate "true weirdo" applies or not, but it's descriptive enough.
DonHopkins 37 minutes ago [-]
Hey, Klingon is totally mainstream and has been for decades longer than Raku has been around. Andorian is what true weirdos speak.
librasteve 2 hours ago [-]
lol - I guess there is no defence for the long delays in getting Perl6 out of the door (2000-2015) and for sure that Osborned perl (5) and created a justified reaction from the perl community who wished that it had never happened. Thus the (slow) divorce with this being the decree nisi.
Turns out that Larry (and the team) were much better at language design than project management.
That said, since 2015 we have been blessed with an awesome new language.
kamaal 20 minutes ago [-]
>>Turns out that Larry (and the team) were much better at language design than project management.
It is true many times to deliver quality products you can't have deadlines. But without a deadline you are never finishing a thing.
Unfortunately for Perl, Larry Wall, and several of its project leads(Patrick Michaud, Audrey Tang) at various times had major health issues. Time moves on, and people have to at times resign entirely from projects due to shifting priorities and personal problems. Parrot VM I guess went through a similar arc.
Other people have moved mountains to get Perl going. But with time people's priorities have entirely moved on. At one time, all Python programmers would do is bad mouth Perl all over the internet, and that never really stopped. Any body who saw a Perl programmer do over a weekend, what they would take a year to do in their language(especially Java and Python)- had a deep rooted seething envy at Perl and Perl programmers. So they went around almost on religious crusade to have Perl gone. This was done entirely to crush competition. They just didn't want other people to wield a power they didn't have. Lisp has had a similar arc of development over the decades.
Perl 5 development being entirely stopped for years further complicated this issue. Eventually as most of the Perl code in many companies bit rotted and died, newer projects were started in Python/Java. And of course Frontend stack entirely moved away to Node/React. We had mobile development of which Perl never was ever a part of.
By the time ML/AI era came into being Python was defacto the language of programming for these kind of tasks.
The best part is now in the LLM era, the whole idea of a programming language itself is pointless.
librasteve 1 minutes ago [-]
yeah to "deep rooted seething envy"
and yes, LLM is moving HLL to a back seat - but not eliminating it entirely - otherwise, why not have your LLM emit ASM (or binary)
so it is also (just) possible to argue that since the relevance and attention on the HLL you pick choice is diminished, now you can just pick one you like as opposed to sticking with the Python / Go / Rust straightjackets
daneel_w 1 hours ago [-]
Are you saying this as a Perl programmer or as an observer who never wrote any Perl?
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
Considering they're confusing Raku with Perl, I think it's a pretty safe bet they never coded with either.
Context: Raku was formerly Perl 6; it was renamed in October 2019 for compatibility reasons.
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
I looked through this article but wasn't able to find why it was decided to establish it in Netherlands (under the Dutch law). Could someone share it?
librasteve 1 hours ago [-]
The site explains "why the EU" as follows:
A driving motivation for the immediate formation of The Raku Foundation in a country in the European Union is the Cyber Resilience Act, which will make it mandatory for any software that is sold or licensed in the European Union to define its dependencies, to have a mechanism for reporting and fixing faults, and establishes legal responsibility for those who sell software. This has major consequences for FOSS developers, which the EU has taken into account, by creating a new category of entity called Open-source software steward.
As to why NL:
So you gotta choose an EU nation - the choice of NL was really a convenience (the main driver of the project lives there), but NL also has innate strengths as a home as is pretty neutral choice (ie not France, Germany) and a lot of SWE talent and good English speaking skills (even if the legal docs are in local language).
1 hours ago [-]
petesergeant 1 hours ago [-]
> to find why it was decided to establish it in Netherlands
I don't think this is more complicated than Liz being Dutch and based in the Netherlands
librasteve 1 hours ago [-]
well, yeah - but noting that there were many consultations and opportunities to challenge this decision and I (for one) would have complained if I didn't think that NL was a solid choice
From its inception Perl 6 was an incredible journey that resulted in a genuinely weird and interesting new programming language, and squandered a broad wealth of momentum and good will and enthusiasm from the Perl community at large. It was a dramatic slow death over the course of a decade, where people who had built their careers, and small and large companies who had built their economic engines on Perl got to come to the realization that the whole thing was over, killed somewhat inadvertently by its own creator...
More like Nintendo took 35 years to release the "VideoGameGirl", a product with a completely different name, and then suddenly a bunch of die-hard GameBoy fans are complaining that this separate product, even if it shares origin with the GameBoy, somehow doesn't even run games made for a different console.
That's how this Perl/Raku navelgazing feels like to me.
For a random complaint of mine (one of many) see [1]. Using Perl as my main programming language for 3.5 years has given me plenty of "meat" to throw around; I just don't want to bore people with it, nor do I want to re-live the trauma.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42460014
Turns out that Larry (and the team) were much better at language design than project management.
That said, since 2015 we have been blessed with an awesome new language.
It is true many times to deliver quality products you can't have deadlines. But without a deadline you are never finishing a thing.
Unfortunately for Perl, Larry Wall, and several of its project leads(Patrick Michaud, Audrey Tang) at various times had major health issues. Time moves on, and people have to at times resign entirely from projects due to shifting priorities and personal problems. Parrot VM I guess went through a similar arc.
Other people have moved mountains to get Perl going. But with time people's priorities have entirely moved on. At one time, all Python programmers would do is bad mouth Perl all over the internet, and that never really stopped. Any body who saw a Perl programmer do over a weekend, what they would take a year to do in their language(especially Java and Python)- had a deep rooted seething envy at Perl and Perl programmers. So they went around almost on religious crusade to have Perl gone. This was done entirely to crush competition. They just didn't want other people to wield a power they didn't have. Lisp has had a similar arc of development over the decades.
Perl 5 development being entirely stopped for years further complicated this issue. Eventually as most of the Perl code in many companies bit rotted and died, newer projects were started in Python/Java. And of course Frontend stack entirely moved away to Node/React. We had mobile development of which Perl never was ever a part of.
By the time ML/AI era came into being Python was defacto the language of programming for these kind of tasks.
The best part is now in the LLM era, the whole idea of a programming language itself is pointless.
and yes, LLM is moving HLL to a back seat - but not eliminating it entirely - otherwise, why not have your LLM emit ASM (or binary)
fortunately Raku got enough https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/raku and https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Raku that it made the cut to be usable on LLMs
so it is also (just) possible to argue that since the relevance and attention on the HLL you pick choice is diminished, now you can just pick one you like as opposed to sticking with the Python / Go / Rust straightjackets
> The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles. There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech.
> An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with the existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)
That section is worth a read in my opinion.
well yeah the call to action is for all interested folks to register so that we can share details on how to become a member of the foundation
Guys.
We will just skip to perl7 anyway. People are too confused now.
A driving motivation for the immediate formation of The Raku Foundation in a country in the European Union is the Cyber Resilience Act, which will make it mandatory for any software that is sold or licensed in the European Union to define its dependencies, to have a mechanism for reporting and fixing faults, and establishes legal responsibility for those who sell software. This has major consequences for FOSS developers, which the EU has taken into account, by creating a new category of entity called Open-source software steward.
As to why NL:
So you gotta choose an EU nation - the choice of NL was really a convenience (the main driver of the project lives there), but NL also has innate strengths as a home as is pretty neutral choice (ie not France, Germany) and a lot of SWE talent and good English speaking skills (even if the legal docs are in local language).
I don't think this is more complicated than Liz being Dutch and based in the Netherlands