<story><title>Why Would Anyone Use Perl 6?</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/01/why-in-the-world-would-anyone-use-perl-6.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>muraiki</author><text>I think I&amp;#x27;m just surprised and saddened that HN heaps so much hatred on P6. I mean, we&amp;#x27;re a community of hackers: do we really need to ask &amp;quot;why another programming language&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;The hatred P6 receives here reminds me a lot of the hatred Go used to receive, where every article posted devolved into a discussion regarding the lack of generics. I bought into the &amp;quot;Go is a regression&amp;quot; meme for a long time until I started using it to solve real problems at work, and now I love it.&lt;p&gt;I hope that we programmers can learn to rejoice in each other&amp;#x27;s creations rather than to heap scorn and criticism on anything not from our particular tribe. It reminds me of people who insist that you can only like a single video game console... heaven forbid you use more than one, or one with inferior graphics (but with more fun games!), etc.</text></item><item><author>MichaelBurge</author><text>Perl tends to be a practical language: Perl programmers are too busy working on their product to rebuke scathing criticisms from angry bloggers and the peanut gallery. But that angry blogger? He&amp;#x27;ll get a mob together and start protesting outside your house if he catches you using the wrong Javascript library.&lt;p&gt;I say don&amp;#x27;t worry about the criticism and popular opinion: The specific language you use is pretty far down the list of problems that a given software might have. You&amp;#x27;ll build up some useful libraries in your niche and eventually other people will see that the most time-effective way to solve a problem in that niche is to use Perl 6 to get access your libraries.&lt;p&gt;Every other language I use derives from its specific purpose: Ruby because vendors like PayPal or AWS publish Ruby gems(and because of Rails); Haskell for writing parsers, interpreters, and compilers(ADTs and parsing monads); C if I&amp;#x27;m trying to understand some code and need it to be portable or operationally simple; Perl 5 if it&amp;#x27;s a quick prototype script. Just the other week I needed a Bayesian variant of Prolog and would&amp;#x27;ve used Perl 6 if it had a library for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Frondo</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s my take on it:&lt;p&gt;Hackers or not, we&amp;#x27;re all still human, and experience emotions like frustration and disappointment.  Back when perl6 was first being discussed (what was it, 15 years ago now?), probably a lot of us were getting a ton of mileage out of the remarkable perl5 ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;When perl6 started getting promoted, it seemed like it took a lot of the wind out of the perl5 sails, like an Osborne effect for a programming language.&lt;p&gt;When the years ticked by and nothing came of it, and lots of moved onto other languages, I imagine a lot of people still remembered being disappointed at how the perl5-&amp;gt;6 situation played out.&lt;p&gt;Probably some of the negativity is just remnants of that, because, like I said, we&amp;#x27;re all still human.&lt;p&gt;And schadenfreude, I&amp;#x27;m sure, plays into it, like when the overhyped disappointments Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever were released...&lt;p&gt;Anyway, just one man&amp;#x27;s opinion, of course...</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Would Anyone Use Perl 6?</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/01/why-in-the-world-would-anyone-use-perl-6.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>muraiki</author><text>I think I&amp;#x27;m just surprised and saddened that HN heaps so much hatred on P6. I mean, we&amp;#x27;re a community of hackers: do we really need to ask &amp;quot;why another programming language&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;The hatred P6 receives here reminds me a lot of the hatred Go used to receive, where every article posted devolved into a discussion regarding the lack of generics. I bought into the &amp;quot;Go is a regression&amp;quot; meme for a long time until I started using it to solve real problems at work, and now I love it.&lt;p&gt;I hope that we programmers can learn to rejoice in each other&amp;#x27;s creations rather than to heap scorn and criticism on anything not from our particular tribe. It reminds me of people who insist that you can only like a single video game console... heaven forbid you use more than one, or one with inferior graphics (but with more fun games!), etc.</text></item><item><author>MichaelBurge</author><text>Perl tends to be a practical language: Perl programmers are too busy working on their product to rebuke scathing criticisms from angry bloggers and the peanut gallery. But that angry blogger? He&amp;#x27;ll get a mob together and start protesting outside your house if he catches you using the wrong Javascript library.&lt;p&gt;I say don&amp;#x27;t worry about the criticism and popular opinion: The specific language you use is pretty far down the list of problems that a given software might have. You&amp;#x27;ll build up some useful libraries in your niche and eventually other people will see that the most time-effective way to solve a problem in that niche is to use Perl 6 to get access your libraries.&lt;p&gt;Every other language I use derives from its specific purpose: Ruby because vendors like PayPal or AWS publish Ruby gems(and because of Rails); Haskell for writing parsers, interpreters, and compilers(ADTs and parsing monads); C if I&amp;#x27;m trying to understand some code and need it to be portable or operationally simple; Perl 5 if it&amp;#x27;s a quick prototype script. Just the other week I needed a Bayesian variant of Prolog and would&amp;#x27;ve used Perl 6 if it had a library for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bhaak</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see hatred in this discussion. I see lots of puzzlement and confusion though. This might be because the article doesn&amp;#x27;t really accomplish what the title promises as the features and examples given don&amp;#x27;t feel compelling to most of the people in this discussion.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if Perl programmers have been separated from the other scripting languages too much as not to understand that there are different mindsets out there.&lt;p&gt;Perl has always been quite a confusing language if you only skimmed it (lots of incoherent features and more than one way to do it), so I find it natural that Perl6 isn&amp;#x27;t any better.&lt;p&gt;But if you don&amp;#x27;t explain the confusing features of a language well enough, puzzlement and confusion is what you get.</text></comment>