Re: just curious to know

[William Michels via perl6-users]

Hi Radhakrishnan,

I think the question you are asking directly relates to your
experience as a programmer. If you have a lot of experience and a
"systems programming toolkit" under your belt (classic bash shell
scripting, sed, awk, and perl_5 ), what does Raku/Perl6 add? The short
answer is: quite a lot. I think the three main reasons are 1).
Unicode/Regexes/Grammars, 2). Rational numbers, and 3). Flexible--but
potentially very stringent--Data Typing (including 'Gradual Typing').

1. Others have chimed in extolling Raku/Perl6's excellent Unicode
support. Also, Raku/Perl6 has completely revamped Regexes making them
much more readable, with whitespace insignificance as default, etc.
(see https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes ). So improved Unicode /
Regex in combination means that you can write the test below against
Bengali digits right out of the box, without having to set an encoding
and/or language (REPL code/results below):

> say $/ if '০১২৩৪৫৬৭৮৯' ~~ /  \d+ /;
｢০১২৩৪৫৬৭৮৯｣
>

2. Others have also mentioned Raku/Perl6's support for rational
numbers--both via numeric entry, and as a storage mechanism (see:
https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thrones-programming-languages).
That means you can read/write the numbers below, with expected results
(REPL code/results below):

> 1/3 + 2/3
1
> 1/3 + 1/6
0.5
> (2/3).numerator
2
> (1/6).denominator
6
> (2/7).nude
(2 7)
> (0.375).nude
(3 8)
>

3. Another attraction is Raku/Perl6's 'Typing' implementation (see:
http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/04/perl-6-types-made-for-humans.html
). You can 1). leave variables untyped and rely on Raku/Perl6's
dynamic typing, you can 2). encode variables such that they are
restricted to a static (built-in) type, or you can 3). use 'gradual
typing' (see 
https://www.learningraku.com/2016/11/24/quick-tip-8-user-defined-data-types/
). [Also here: 
https://docs.raku.org/language/typesystem#index-entry-subset-subset
]. This isn't something I've played with extensively, but I imagine
Raku/Perl6's extremely flexible typing system means you can get code
up and running quickly with toy data, then refine the code to exclude
real-world (forbidden) data types.

So I think even if you are an experienced programmer with a solid
"systems programming toolkit", the three points above are all good
reasons to learn Raku/Perl6. You can look up a recent thread on this
mailing-list to see some code solutions to a real-world programming
problem (see: 
https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2020/05/msg8423.html
).

OTOH, if you DON'T already have a "systems programming toolkit" under
your belt, wouldn't it make more sense just to learn Raku/Perl6, and
not the combination of bash shell scripting, sed, awk, and perl_5 ?
And once mastered, use Raku/Perl6 as a 'glue language' for database,
website/web_services, text_processing/text_mining, and Machine
Learning applications?

https://youtu.be/q8stPrG1rDo

Best, Bill.

W. Michels, Ph.D.












On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 8:04 AM Radhakrishnan Venkataraman
 wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was announced, I 
> waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just started from its 
> starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy about that.
>
> Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system 
> administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc.,
>
> I want to know what perl 6 is so special in.  When perl 5.0 was there, there 
> did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as perl 5.0 
> did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special?  I am unable to know it 
> from google search, as much information is not available.
>
> Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 6, 
> then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) are already 
> spreading its wings over the information technology field.  Both are 
> statically typed and compiled languages and there would be more "welcome 
> gesture" for these languages in the field.
>
> To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's 
> technology?
> Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Regards,
> Radhakrishnan

Re: just curious to know

[Parrot Raiser]

There is potentially a place for Raku in education, as a language that
can evolve from simple expressions in the REPL to one-liners, basic
scripts and through to complete CS courses with the various
programming paradigms (procedural, O-O, functional) and into language
design with grammars.

The challenge is to develop the progression and its signposts in a way
that lures the unwary onto the path, (why do I hear that in Damian
Conway's vice?) rather then terrifying them with the whole vast
edifice. I'm stii trying to grasp enough of the concepts to decide the
logical sequence. The trouble is that those who have a complete
understanding of the language have almost certainly forgotten what it
was like to be naive and bewildered.

On 6/14/20, ToddAndMargo via perl6-users  wrote:
> On 2020-06-14 08:04, Radhakrishnan Venkataraman wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was
>> announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just
>> started from its starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy
>> about that.
>
> Hi Radhakrishnan,
>
> I am a beginner at Raku and this is from a beginner's
> prospective.  (But when did that ever stop me?)
>
> I come from all kinds of computer aided testing programs,
> most of which I have forgotten, then Pascal, then
> Modula 2.  More recently bash, batch and Perl 5.
>
> I program in what is called "Top Down".
>  https://www.quora.com/What-is-top-down-programming?share=1
>
> Consequently, I use tons and tons of subroutines.  Perl 5
> is an "absolute nightmare" for Top Down.  Perl 5 passes
> variables to subroutines as pointers in an array.  (Note
> that Pointers in Perl 5 are referred to as "references"
> and calling them the generic term "pointer" is picking a
> fight with Perl 5 programmers.)  There are no pointer
> (references) in Raku as they are not necessary AND GOOD
> RIDDANCE!!
>
> When I discovered subroutines in Raku, I though I'd died
> and gone to Top Down heaven.
>  https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_6_Programming/Subroutines
>
> The insane subroutine parameters in Perl5 make for a lot
> of Bottom Up programming.  Because of it Perl 5 programs
> tend to become "Write Only" programs in a heck of a hurry
> and are very hard to maintain.
>
> The main program I support downloads raw web pages and
> digs through them looking for new software revision.
> I use regex's "a lot".  Just my personal opinion,
> but regex's in Raku and a ton easier to use and much
> more well thought out than Perl 5.  (Perl 5's
> regex's remind me of sed's regex's.)
>
> Also Raku's text manipulation programs are to die for.
> You will find yourself using a lot fewer regex's
> because of them: "contains", "starts-with", "ends-with"
> come to mind.
>
> Where Perl 5 has it over Perl6 (Raku) is:
>
> 1) the documents in Perl 5, called Perl Docs, are
> wonderfully written and cater to both beginners and
> experts.  Raku's documents are written as a
> refresher for those that already know what they
> are doing and not for the beginner.  You will tear
> your hair out trying use them and maybe say a few
> "bad" words.
>
> 2) Perl 5 compiles in a heck of a hurry.  Large
> Raku programs take up to ten seconds to compile.
> They are working on it.  The work around is
> the put the main body of your program in a module
> and let .precomp (precomile) take care of it.  Raku
> only re-compiles modules if you have made a change
>
> 3) Raku can not make system calls to Windows if
> it has quotes in it.  It is fixed, but waiting to
> be rolled out.  The work around is to write
> to a bat file and then run the bat file.
>
> 4) Raku programs always do a pop up box in
> Windows and can not be run in the background,
> as they can in Linux.  They are also working on
> it.  I do not know the progress, but it has
> a "very soon" feeling.
>
> Where neither shine is the lack of GUI component
> for laying out GUI windows.  Not to fear, Raku
> does have a module that interfaces with GTK's
> (Gnome Tool Kit's) "Glade" GUI interface designer.
> I have not used it yet, but plan on pounding it
> in the future.  Oh, and GTK and Glade is wonderfully
> cross platform.  Yippee!!
>  https://glade.gnome.org/
>  https://modules.raku.org/dist/Gnome::Gtk3::Glade:cpan:MARTIMM
>
> 5) Perl 5 has a much more "mature" module base.
> But not to fear on that front either.  Raku
> is quickly getting there and the rate of
> development is dizzying.
>
> And very important, Raku has an absolutely wonderful
> army of mensches both on this list and on the chat
> line that bend over backwards to help you.  The
> developers have some astounding programming chops.
>
> The Perl 5 newsgroups tend to be "grouchy", although
> they are quite helpful.  Perl Monks talks over
> everyone's heads.  And Perl Monks web interface must
> have  been designed by the devil himself, when he
> was not working on batch programming
>
> To conclude. I absolute LOVE Raku.  It is my
> favorite 

Re: just curious to know

[ToddAndMargo via perl6-users]

On 2020-06-14 08:04, Radhakrishnan Venkataraman wrote:

Hi,
I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was 
announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just 
started from its starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy 
about that.


Hi Radhakrishnan,

I am a beginner at Raku and this is from a beginner's
prospective.  (But when did that ever stop me?)

I come from all kinds of computer aided testing programs,
most of which I have forgotten, then Pascal, then
Modula 2.  More recently bash, batch and Perl 5.

I program in what is called "Top Down".
https://www.quora.com/What-is-top-down-programming?share=1

Consequently, I use tons and tons of subroutines.  Perl 5
is an "absolute nightmare" for Top Down.  Perl 5 passes
variables to subroutines as pointers in an array.  (Note
that Pointers in Perl 5 are referred to as "references"
and calling them the generic term "pointer" is picking a
fight with Perl 5 programmers.)  There are no pointer
(references) in Raku as they are not necessary AND GOOD
RIDDANCE!!

When I discovered subroutines in Raku, I though I'd died
and gone to Top Down heaven.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_6_Programming/Subroutines

The insane subroutine parameters in Perl5 make for a lot
of Bottom Up programming.  Because of it Perl 5 programs
tend to become "Write Only" programs in a heck of a hurry
and are very hard to maintain.

The main program I support downloads raw web pages and
digs through them looking for new software revision.
I use regex's "a lot".  Just my personal opinion,
but regex's in Raku and a ton easier to use and much
more well thought out than Perl 5.  (Perl 5's
regex's remind me of sed's regex's.)

Also Raku's text manipulation programs are to die for.
You will find yourself using a lot fewer regex's
because of them: "contains", "starts-with", "ends-with"
come to mind.

Where Perl 5 has it over Perl6 (Raku) is:

1) the documents in Perl 5, called Perl Docs, are
wonderfully written and cater to both beginners and
experts.  Raku's documents are written as a
refresher for those that already know what they
are doing and not for the beginner.  You will tear
your hair out trying use them and maybe say a few
"bad" words.

2) Perl 5 compiles in a heck of a hurry.  Large
Raku programs take up to ten seconds to compile.
They are working on it.  The work around is
the put the main body of your program in a module
and let .precomp (precomile) take care of it.  Raku
only re-compiles modules if you have made a change

3) Raku can not make system calls to Windows if
it has quotes in it.  It is fixed, but waiting to
be rolled out.  The work around is to write
to a bat file and then run the bat file.

4) Raku programs always do a pop up box in
Windows and can not be run in the background,
as they can in Linux.  They are also working on
it.  I do not know the progress, but it has
a "very soon" feeling.

Where neither shine is the lack of GUI component
for laying out GUI windows.  Not to fear, Raku
does have a module that interfaces with GTK's
(Gnome Tool Kit's) "Glade" GUI interface designer.
I have not used it yet, but plan on pounding it
in the future.  Oh, and GTK and Glade is wonderfully
cross platform.  Yippee!!
https://glade.gnome.org/
https://modules.raku.org/dist/Gnome::Gtk3::Glade:cpan:MARTIMM

5) Perl 5 has a much more "mature" module base.
But not to fear on that front either.  Raku
is quickly getting there and the rate of
development is dizzying.

And very important, Raku has an absolutely wonderful
army of mensches both on this list and on the chat
line that bend over backwards to help you.  The
developers have some astounding programming chops.

The Perl 5 newsgroups tend to be "grouchy", although
they are quite helpful.  Perl Monks talks over
everyone's heads.  And Perl Monks web interface must
have  been designed by the devil himself, when he
was not working on batch programming

To conclude. I absolute LOVE Raku.  It is my
favorite language of all time.  It is the most
"human readable" I have come across.  Compound that
with Top Down, programs become a dream to maintain.
Perl 5 is anything but human readable and I hated
trying to maintain them.

I have converted all but one Perl 5 program to Raku
(Raku's ftp module does not work) and have started
converting over my longest/worst batch and bash
programs to it.  I strongly recommend it.  You will
fall in love with it too.

My 2 cents,
-T

And now a word from Linus Torvalds:
--
~~
When you say, "I wrote a program that
crashed Windows, "people just stare at
you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those
with the system, for free."
 -- Linus Torvalds
~~

Re: just curious to know

[Aureliano Guedes]

I'd like to contribute with m 1 cent.

Perhaps I read an interesting point mentioned by Richard:
"- Perl regular expressions (regexes) are copied (badly??) by every !!!
other language. But Raku takes them much further, and more flexibilty.
After getting used to Raku regexes, I tear my hair out when I go to
another language."

At this point, I'd like to bring you my limited acknowledgment is drive by
the fact I'm am a biologist, not a programmer, but I love code out. I
started with Perl5 and after C/C++, R and Python. And I use my programming
skills to develop some scripts to automatize some things but nowadays I'm
using a lot of R to data science & data analysis focus on biological data.
In this field, text processing is very required and even R being
implemented the regex up to Perl5 I'm too tear my hair out.

Not only by that, but Raku may ave a beautiful place in data analysis if
the library ecosystem grows up to this purpose.
in time, I'd like to help to implement those libraries, even if we may
import directly from Perl5 (which still has a bigger ecosystem of
biological packages when compared with R or Python), but my time is sadly
limitated.

Also, most important to data science, I think:
- library to plot data preferred based in the grammar of graphics (as
ggplot2)
- library to deal with data frames ('a grammar of data manipulation' based,
as dplyr)
- library to statistical tests and descriptions (also to implement
training, ML, .)
- And last but not least, a good environment to dynamic code/analyze as
Jupiter, Rstudio (or a well personalized Vim/Emacs)

With the Concurrency, Assincronism, and Paralelims paradigms, and the nice
precisely way that Raku represents equations (0.1 * 3 = 0.3 aways should be
true), I think soon Raku may get a good place in data science and data
analysis field.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 1:25 PM Mark Devine  wrote:

> Radhakrishnan,
>
>
>
> I would be considered a non-developer and more of a system
> admin/architect.  I’ve used Perl 4/5 since the 1990s with success.  My
> opinion of Python is not particularly high, except that it is ubiquitous
> (like Perl 5).  Ruby was not unpleasant.  I’ve sampled a few others, but
> none were particularly fantastic for my general scripting purposes.
>
>
>
> I consider Raku  (formally renamed from “Perl 6” Oct
> 2019) as a modern alternative to Perl 5.  All of my operating system
> scripts are now in implemented in Raku.
>
>
>
> I did frequently wince at some of the constructs that I had to put
> together in Perl.  I saw myself writing line noise and write-only
> scripts/modules, but I really didn’t have alternatives in Perl.  I have yet
> to experience any regret with coding Raku.  Raku appears to me to be the
> most well-thought-out language I’ve ever experienced.  I make basic &
> intermediate programming constructs, and the deeper I go, the more
> satisfying the coding experience.  I am confident that I can make reusable
> code in Raku that will be maintainable in 20 years.  The Raku coding
> experience to me is like that of a 12-year-old playing the latest video
> game on a 90” 16K screen.  That’s just how it is.  I don’t mean to
> cheerlead.  I’m sincere.  It promotes “flow”, which encourages me to learn
> and produce more.  Perl had that “flow” characteristic too, and Raku
> inherited it.
>
>
>
> The first release was Christmas 2015, launching with a small ecosystem
> .  Now it is growing with many useful modules
> (Web Services, DevOps, etc.).  The community is active, very patient,
> civil, and spot-on-helpful.
>
>
>
> Raku is a big language.  I’m really hoping one or more of the superstars
> of Raku will publish “Idiomatic Raku: Parallelism, Concurrency, &
> Asynchrony”, “Idiomatic Raku: *This*”, “Idiomatic Raku: *That*”, etc.  A
> big language like this would benefit from more guidance.  Random blogs
> regularly publish brilliant Raku ideas, but it is a challenge to
> catalog/archive them.  I do hope for more expert knowledge sharing.
>
>
>
> I think Larry Wall’s ambition was to make a “100 year” language.
> Personally I can see that in Raku (until Quantum perhaps).  Raku has legs.
> It probably isn’t positioned for the popularity contests of today, but I
> think that it has much more promise than people are aware of.
>
>
>
> Try building a website or a web service in Cro  to
> see the utility of Raku first hand.
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> *From:* Radhakrishnan Venkataraman 
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 14, 2020 11:04
> *To:* l...@dijkmat.nl
> *Cc:* perl6-users@perl.org
> *Subject:* just curious to know
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was
> announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just
> started from its starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy about
> that.
>
>
>
> Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system
> administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing 

RE: just curious to know

[Mark Devine]

Radhakrishnan,

I would be considered a non-developer and more of a system admin/architect.  
I’ve used Perl 4/5 since the 1990s with success.  My opinion of Python is not 
particularly high, except that it is ubiquitous (like Perl 5).  Ruby was not 
unpleasant.  I’ve sampled a few others, but none were particularly fantastic 
for my general scripting purposes.

I consider Raku (formally renamed from “Perl 6” Oct 2019) as 
a modern alternative to Perl 5.  All of my operating system scripts are now in 
implemented in Raku.

I did frequently wince at some of the constructs that I had to put together in 
Perl.  I saw myself writing line noise and write-only scripts/modules, but I 
really didn’t have alternatives in Perl.  I have yet to experience any regret 
with coding Raku.  Raku appears to me to be the most well-thought-out language 
I’ve ever experienced.  I make basic & intermediate programming constructs, and 
the deeper I go, the more satisfying the coding experience.  I am confident 
that I can make reusable code in Raku that will be maintainable in 20 years.  
The Raku coding experience to me is like that of a 12-year-old playing the 
latest video game on a 90” 16K screen.  That’s just how it is.  I don’t mean to 
cheerlead.  I’m sincere.  It promotes “flow”, which encourages me to learn and 
produce more.  Perl had that “flow” characteristic too, and Raku inherited it.

The first release was Christmas 2015, launching with a small 
ecosystem.  Now it is growing with many useful 
modules (Web Services, DevOps, etc.).  The community is active, very patient, 
civil, and spot-on-helpful.

Raku is a big language.  I’m really hoping one or more of the superstars of 
Raku will publish “Idiomatic Raku: Parallelism, Concurrency, & Asynchrony”, 
“Idiomatic Raku: This”, “Idiomatic Raku: That”, etc.  A big language like this 
would benefit from more guidance.  Random blogs regularly publish brilliant 
Raku ideas, but it is a challenge to catalog/archive them.  I do hope for more 
expert knowledge sharing.

I think Larry Wall’s ambition was to make a “100 year” language.  Personally I 
can see that in Raku (until Quantum perhaps).  Raku has legs.  It probably 
isn’t positioned for the popularity contests of today, but I think that it has 
much more promise than people are aware of.

Try building a website or a web service in Cro to see 
the utility of Raku first hand.

Mark

From: Radhakrishnan Venkataraman 
Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2020 11:04
To: l...@dijkmat.nl
Cc: perl6-users@perl.org
Subject: just curious to know

Hi,
I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was announced, I 
waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just started from its 
starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy about that.

Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system 
administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc.,

I want to know what perl 6 is so special in.  When perl 5.0 was there, there 
did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as perl 5.0 did. 
Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special?  I am unable to know it from 
google search, as much information is not available.

Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 6, then 
Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) are already 
spreading its wings over the information technology field.  Both are statically 
typed and compiled languages and there would be more "welcome gesture" for 
these languages in the field.

To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's technology?
Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.

Thank you,

Regards,
Radhakrishnan

Re: just curious to know

[Joseph Brenner]

No particular "killer app" has emerged for Raku as
of yet, there's no task that's going to make you go
"Aha, this is a job for Raku!".  But you know, it's
not as though the original perl was designed to be
the Web 1.0 server-side scripting language or the
saviour of the human genome project...

That said there are a number of features of Raku
that are attractive and might turn out to be
critically useful... you mention what I like to
call the CAP features (Concurrency, Asyncrony and
Parallelism) and you're certainly correct that
languages like Go are used more frequently in that
space, but the Raku version of equivalent Go code
tends to be quite a bit tighter and arguably easier
to follow.  I would imagine that Go is a typically
a performance win over Raku, but the ease of
writing correct code matters too, and I expect there's
still room for performance optimization with Raku.

Another virtue of Raku is it's regular expressions
have been re-thought and redesigned (it's one of
the few languages that doesn't care about having
"perl compliant" regexs), and in addition to that
there are additional grammar features included,
making it a good choice for hacking special-purpose
parsers.

There's some improvements included in core for very
basic things like handling numerics-- very large
integers mostly Just Work, there's support for true
rational numbers (less worries floating point
aproximations are going to throw you a curve), and
so on.

Comparing Raku to Perl, there are a number of small
improvements I find very convenient (some Raku
fans say the reason they like it is "the little
things"), e.g. if you want to loop over an array
handling *three* elements at a time, this works:

for @items -> $alpha, $beta, $gamma {
say "first: $alpha, second: $beta, third: $gamma";
}


On 6/14/20, Radhakrishnan Venkataraman  wrote:
> Hi,
> I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was announced,
> I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has just started from
> its starting block and is also in the race.  I am happy about that.
>
> Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system
> administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc.,
>
> I want to know what perl 6 is so special in.  When perl 5.0 was there,
> there did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as perl
> 5.0 did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special?  I am unable to know
> it from google search, as much information is not available.
>
> Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 6,
> then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) are
> already spreading its wings over the information technology field.  Both
> are statically typed and compiled languages and there would be more
> "welcome gesture" for these languages in the field.
>
> To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's
> technology?
> Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Regards,
> Radhakrishnan
>

Re: just curious to know

[Theo van den Heuvel]

Hi,

If you allow me to jump in.

I have used scores of programming languages. For me, raku (as it is now 
called) is the language to go to if I need a serious textual analysis of 
any kind.
The design aspect of the language that I rely on heavily is the Grammar 
class, which so fundamentally augments the notion of regular expression 
that it allows me to make transformations of data that would be very 
much harder in other languages.


Other people will have other motivations, I am sure.

good luck,
Theo van den Heuvel

Radhakrishnan Venkataraman schreef op 2020-06-14 17:04:

Hi,
I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was
announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has
just started from its starting block and is also in the race.  I am
happy about that.

Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system
administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files
etc.,

I want to know what perl 6 is so special in.  When perl 5.0 was there,
there did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as
perl 5.0 did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special?  I am
unable to know it from google search, as much information is not
available.

Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl
6, then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism)
are already spreading its wings over the information technology field.
 Both are statically typed and compiled languages and there would be
more "welcome gesture" for these languages in the field.

To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's
technology?
Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.

Thank you,

Regards,
Radhakrishnan

Re: just curious to know

[Tom Browder]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 10:56 Richard Hainsworth 
wrote:

> Hi Radhakrishnan,
>
> If 'spreading wings over the information technology field' were to mean
> anything other than what is fashionable today, then C still reigns.


Richard, excellently said!

I would like to see that on our Raku.org site in a prominent place.

-Tom

Re: just curious to know

[Richard Hainsworth]

Hi Radhakrishnan,

If 'spreading wings over the information technology field' were to mean 
anything other than what is fashionable today, then C still reigns.


And if anything, COBOL still is so important in big financial 
institutions that COBOL programmers earn more than Java programmers - if 
some articles are to be believed.


But fashion or pride **is** important, not technical or intellectual 
superiority - there are examples where a technically inferior technology 
became more widely used. Just in the IT field, MS Windows is more 
widespread than Linux. Is this because Windows is 'better technically', 
'better funded', 'better advertised'? or whatever. Please don't answer 
because I'm only asking hypothetical questions that don't have binary 
answers. My aim is to show you that the question you ask has underlying 
assumptions that may not be true.


What matters to me (because it affects what I do, and I am unable to 
affect what other people do in their blind herd instinct) are the following:


a) Can I write  elegant programs in a language, without excessive words? 
I'm looking askance at Java, which is still one of the most popular 
languages around. By elegance, I mean take a complex problem and write a 
program so that I can come back to it two years later and quickly work 
out how it runs.


b) Can I write programs that can be easily tested - for me the following 
programming paradigm leads to good code: writing a test, writing the 
documentation, writing the code (iterating the cycle), and not the other 
way around.


c) Can I write a one line piece of code to test something, or do 
something quickly on a terminal? Can I use the same language to write a 
complex piece of software?


d) Does the language deal clearly with subtle problems, eg., Is there a 
distinction between code reuse, and extensions of existing objects.


e) Does the language do things I can't do easily in other languages?

So for me, the answer to (a)-(d) is unambiguously yes. And there are a 
number of things I can list for Raku / Perl 6 for (e)


- Unicode. You can use any human language you want for your identifiers 
and numbers. You could create aliases in any language for any of the 
functions in Raku. You can create your own functions using any character.


- Perl regular expressions (regexes) are copied (badly??) by every !!! 
other language. But Raku takes them much further, and more flexibilty. 
After getting used to Raku regexes, I tear my hair out when I go to 
another language.


- Regexes are extended into Grammars and Actions. This in my view is 
where Raku will be most used.


- I think most of all is that I can write a program that is a bit like a 
conversation. Flow statements like 'when', 'if', 'unless', 'for', 
'with', 'without' just make it so much easier to write understandably.


- There is an explicit difference between Truthiness and Definedness. 
Eg. 'if' is about truthiness, but 'with' is about definedness. And '0' 
can be made to be 'True' if you need it to be.


I have used many languages, but I find myself coming back to Raku.

This is a quick response, and I'm sure I missed something out - oh yes: 
concurrency ...


Regards

Richard

On 14/06/2020 16:04, Radhakrishnan Venkataraman wrote:

Hi,
I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past.  Ever since perl 6.0 was 
announced, I waited, like many, indefinitely.  At last perl 6.0 has 
just started from its starting block and is also in the race.  I am 
happy about that.


Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system 
administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc.,


I want to know what perl 6 is so special in.  When perl 5.0 was there, 
there did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as 
perl 5.0 did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special?  I am 
unable to know it from google search, as much information is 
not available.


Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 
6, then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) 
are already spreading its wings over the information technology 
field.  Both are statically typed and compiled languages and there 
would be more "welcome gesture" for these languages in the field.


To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's 
technology?

Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.

Thank you,

Regards,
Radhakrishnan