Re: is there a Perl 5 converter?

[Darren Duncan]

On 2016-01-20 5:02 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote:

or is it all by hand?


If you mean a source code translator, I don't know of one right now but I 
wouldn't be surprised if one exists, that at least handles a common subset of 
Perl 5 code.  I expect having one will be a priority if it isn't around now.


Maybe around 5 years ago I recall that the Perl 5 interpreter was updated to 
retain all source metadata in its parse tree partly so that this could be a 
basis to generate the original Perl 5 source, or alternately generate 
corresponding Perl 6 from it.  See also the CPAN module PPI which may be a basis 
for one.


You may not need a source translator though.

The Perl 6 module Inline::Perl5 lets you simply use Perl 5 modules in Perl 6 
programs as if they were Perl 6 modules.


The source translation I'm aware of is generally by hand, and often people doing 
it are also doing significant rewrites to take better advantage of the new Perl 
6 features and idioms that a more mechanical automatic translation wouldn't.


Did that tell you anything useful?

-- Darren Duncan

is there a Perl 5 converter?

[ToddAndMargo]

or is it all by hand?

--
~~
Computers are like air conditioners.
They malfunction when you open windows
~~

Porting considerations

[Parrot Raiser]

How difficult is it to port moar-VM to different versions of Linux,
and different processor architectures?

I'm thinking particularly of this machine: http://www.parallella.org/
which has multiple processors, designed, as the name suggests, for
parallel processing. Given Perl 6's native parallel constructs, there
would seem to be some synergy.

I'm not suggesting diverting any developer effort away from the main
jobs at the moment, but an estimate of the effort involved would be a
useful start.

Re: Porting considerations

[Timo Paulssen]

On 20/01/16 15:55, Parrot Raiser wrote:

How difficult is it to port moar-VM to different versions of Linux,
and different processor architectures?

I'm thinking particularly of this machine: http://www.parallella.org/
which has multiple processors, designed, as the name suggests, for
parallel processing. Given Perl 6's native parallel constructs, there
would seem to be some synergy.

I'm not suggesting diverting any developer effort away from the main
jobs at the moment, but an estimate of the effort involved would be a
useful start.


MoarVM already runs pretty much everywhere unless the build system 
messes up, or our libuv dependency doesn't support the host system.


The only difficult thing is porting the JIT compiler to different 
architectures, as it has large portions of per-platform assembly 
language source in it.


Hope that helps?
  - Timo

Re: Perl 6 Advocacy Suggestion

[Andrew Kirkpatrick]

I agree that getting Perl6 into the curricula is a good idea, and
comparing it to Python if done reasonably and politely would help the
cause of those who want to migrate their course over.

That said I don't think that those fine folk on Perlmonks are all that
correct about the lack of a business case for Perl6, and the degree to
which they are will fall significantly in the next few years. Already
its trivial to use most modules on the CPAN with Inline::Perl5 (given
a perl5 built with -fPIC) and the NativeCall library makes C libraries
easy to use with relatively simple declarations. There are tooling,
speed, portability and stability issues to be sorted but in all these
cases I think the future looks brighter for v6.

Businesses need to keep an eye out for what's next and while I
wouldn't bet the farm on one language, it seems reasonable to bet the
back paddock on v6.

Just my 2c. Don't flame me bro'!

On 20 January 2016 at 14:25, vijayvithal jahagirdar
 wrote:
> I agree, perl6 can be the glue language in academics which can be used to
> showcase different computing concepts, be it methodologies - functional,
> oops,procedural -, parallelism, VM, antlr etc.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 2:29 AM Peter Scott  wrote:
>>
>> I have seen Damian demonstrate how Perl 6 can be the best language for
>> teaching functional, procedural, and object-oriented programming.
>>
>> On 1/19/2016 10:37 AM, Darren Duncan wrote:
>> > I very much agree with this idea, of arguing Perl 6 as a teaching
>> > language. Academia are the ones that would appreciate what Perl 6
>> > offers the most in the short term, whereas industry would demand a
>> > higher standard for it becoming popular.  And the first can lead to
>> > the second. -- Darren Duncan
>> >
>> > On 2016-01-19 9:19 AM, Parrot Raiser wrote:
>> >> I believe Damian Conway thinks P6 would be a very good CS teaching
>> >> language.
>> >>
>> >> On 1/19/16, Tom Browder  wrote:
>> >>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Steve Mynott
>> >>> 
>> >>> wrote:
>>  I think targeting Perl 6 at CS academic teachers is an excellent idea
>>  as a way of generally promoting use of the language.
>> 
>>  But I'd be wary of "bashing" current choices such as Python and don't
>>  believe any objective comparison of the two languages is possible.
>> 
>>  Python is in any case derived from ABC which was explicitly designed
>>  for teaching purposes.
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm not suggesting bashing Python, Steve, I just think some comparison
>> >>> is necessary.
>> >
>>
>

Perl 6 Advocacy Suggestion

[Tom Browder]

On Tuesday, January 19, 2016, B. Estrade > wrote:
...

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Brett.

Cheers!

-Tom

Re: Perl 6 Advocacy Suggestion

[Tom Browder]

On Wednesday, January 20, 2016, Andrew Kirkpatrick 
wrote:
...

> That said I don't think that those fine folk on Perlmonks are all that

correct about the lack of a business case for Perl6, and the degree to
> which they are will fall significantly in the next few years. Already

...

> Businesses need to keep an eye out for what's next and while I
> wouldn't bet the farm on one language, it seems reasonable to bet the
> back paddock on v6.


Good, uplifting points, Andrew. Thanks.

-Tom

Re: Perl 6 Advocacy Suggestion

[B. Estrade]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:57 AM, Tom Browder  wrote:

> Last year I mentioned a letter-to-the-editor in Communications of the
> ACM which discussed the short-comings of Python as an introduction to
> programming for computer science students.  As a response to that
> letter, I suggested that the dissatisfied professor consider Perl 6 as
> it would meet his requirements.
>
> My casual look at the programming scene over the last decade seems to
> show that Python is regularly chosen as the language for open source
> projects and as a teaching language.  The Perl community on
>   seems adamant that there are few, if any, business
> reasons for Perl 5 shops to use Perl 6, so the academic community may
> be the best place to aim Perl 6 marketing for the growth of a Perl 6
> community among young people.
>
> I have seen lots of blogs and on-line articles comparing the two
> languages, but I have not yet found one truly suitable for college and
> high school academic marketing and curriculum development.  The only
> article on Perl 6 I have found in the ACM archives was a 2007 article
> by Audrey Tang.  Its citation and access page is found here:
>
>   http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1190216.1190218
>
> Note the ACM reports that the article has been cited two times in
> other ACM articles, and has been downloaded a total of 524 times.
>
> I also searched the IEEE archives for Perl 6 and found nothing.
>
> Suggestion
> 
>
> I suggest that a good move would be to produce a good, and current,
> scholarly article, aiming to be published in a suitable professional
> journal, with a detailed, objective comparison between Python and Perl
> 6.  I'm sure there are properly-qualified people in the Perl 6
> community that could do a very credible job, and it should be worth
> support from the Perl Foundation.
>
> Audrey Tang's article (based on information on the citation page only)
> doesn't seem to fit the specific comparison I think is needed, but the
> article may be useful background for any new author.
>
> Of course there may already be such an article in academia, but
> apparently not in the computer science education realm.
>

Good luck with your efforts. There is interest in the academic community
about Perl/Perl6 as evidenced by Larry Wall's inclusion in the HOPL III
round table discussion that I mention here,
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=906901.

The video for your pleasure is here; I hope the FBI does't raid me for
sharing this, but it's of interest to the community and I pay ACM enough
money annually to let me do this once in a while .  It's been a while
since I watched the video, but I recall Larry having to fend off a bunch of
academics who seem to envy/not-understand the widespread adoption of Perl
when their pet language is so nice and pure.

http://www.0x743.com/a4-fisher-h.mov (400MB)

I would think that while you're going to have a tough time selling Perl6 as
a teaching language, it should be (and probably is) of interest to the
those in programming language related SIGs.

I would target them, but in a more academic way - maybe organize some
efforts to discuss the interested/practical features of Perl6 versus some
of the more purely academic languages (where mental masturbation seems to
thrive).

In regards to a teaching language, Python reminds me greatly of the role
Fortran used to play, but here wrt scripting languages. It's made great
inroads not only as a teaching language, but also as a language that HPC
just loves for days.

One reason may be that SciPy suite made such an impact on the HPC world
when it was first released, but there also seems to be some innate
qualities about Python that some science domains prefer. On the other hand,
we know when the domains that Perl dominates (bioinformatics, text
analysis, PDL, etc).

You can also try to impress the folks in communities like LtU - demonstrate
the interesting aspects of the language; compare with their lovelies and
show that Perl6 excels in practical environments. At the end of the day,
what will sell it is not arguing the merits of the language, but
overwhelmingly demonstrating them - again and again and again. And even
after that, they might still not see. Perl6 would not be the first language
to fail at this.

Again, I wish you good luck - and not in a sarcastic way. I appreciate any
and all efforts to make inroads into the academic world for Perl.

Cheers,
Brett


>
> Best regards,
>
> -Tom
>

Re: Perl 6 Advocacy Suggestion

[webmind]

Great idea!

I always thought Perl in general was quite suited for show casing and
learning with different styles and ways of solving problems. It's
flexibility is a key element in that. Especially in CS, students need to
learn that there is more then one way to do it and be able to compare
those different ways. Perl 6 in that line a great asset.

w

On 19/01/16 16:57, Tom Browder wrote:
> Last year I mentioned a letter-to-the-editor in Communications of the
> ACM which discussed the short-comings of Python as an introduction to
> programming for computer science students.  As a response to that
> letter, I suggested that the dissatisfied professor consider Perl 6 as
> it would meet his requirements.
> 
> My casual look at the programming scene over the last decade seems to
> show that Python is regularly chosen as the language for open source
> projects and as a teaching language.  The Perl community on
>   seems adamant that there are few, if any, business
> reasons for Perl 5 shops to use Perl 6, so the academic community may
> be the best place to aim Perl 6 marketing for the growth of a Perl 6
> community among young people.
> 
> I have seen lots of blogs and on-line articles comparing the two
> languages, but I have not yet found one truly suitable for college and
> high school academic marketing and curriculum development.  The only
> article on Perl 6 I have found in the ACM archives was a 2007 article
> by Audrey Tang.  Its citation and access page is found here:
> 
>   http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1190216.1190218
> 
> Note the ACM reports that the article has been cited two times in
> other ACM articles, and has been downloaded a total of 524 times.
> 
> I also searched the IEEE archives for Perl 6 and found nothing.
> 
> Suggestion
> 
> 
> I suggest that a good move would be to produce a good, and current,
> scholarly article, aiming to be published in a suitable professional
> journal, with a detailed, objective comparison between Python and Perl
> 6.  I'm sure there are properly-qualified people in the Perl 6
> community that could do a very credible job, and it should be worth
> support from the Perl Foundation.
> 
> Audrey Tang's article (based on information on the citation page only)
> doesn't seem to fit the specific comparison I think is needed, but the
> article may be useful background for any new author.
> 
> Of course there may already be such an article in academia, but
> apparently not in the computer science education realm.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> -Tom
> 


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