Re: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6?

I've been a day-to-day Rakudo user since 2008. Here are the things I really like:

Classes and roles, available out-of-the box.
where clauses and subtypes. Pretty.
Grammars. Easy to parse just about anything.
Meta-operators. It's fun and easy to think composite thoughts with a single line of code. And it becomes second nature quickly. I miss it in Perl 5.
Multisubs and multimethods. Just plain convenient.
Gradual typing. The types stay out of the way when I don't need them, but are there when I want it. I can choose to give a variable a type or not.
Neater syntax generally. Some things just read nicely in Perl 6. I never thought Perl 5 would feel like boilerplate, but in some cases it does after writing lots of Perl 6.

Things I still miss:

Heredocs. Niecza has them. Rakudo doesn't.
Shaped arrays and hashes a la Synopsis 9. Some multidimensional primitives related to this.
Speed, generally. We got faster at startup recently (jnthn++), and it makes a great difference. Niecza is faster than Rakudo once it gets going. But we still have ways to go in terms of performance.
Call me impatient, but I want the vision of mutable grammars, and a plug-and-play Perl 6 where you can add your own parsing rules or sublanguages, to come to fruition as soon as humanly possible.
Things need to get a lot more polished. A lot of the bits are in place now, but we're disorganized in terms of documentation and in terms of helping a newcomer become productive. We're very grateful for all the feedback we get from newcomers; the early adopters sandpaper the barrier to entry and make it easier for their successors to just pick things up.

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Re^2: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6? by jdporter (Paladin) on Apr 11, 2012 at 18:11 UTC
`[aes://s09\|Synopsis 9]` ⇒ Synopsis 9. See What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6? by Anonymous Monk on Apr 11, 2012 at 18:05 UTC
Things I still miss: Is your list things that you wish were in the language, or things you wish the implementations had? Shaped arrays and hashes a la Synopsis 9. Could you briefly explain what "shaped arrays" are? I've never heard that term, and Synopsis 9 is pretty dense.	[reply]
Re^3: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6? by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 11, 2012 at 19:30 UTC
Is your list things that you wish were in the language, or things you wish the implementations had? Heredocs: implementation missing. Shaped arrays and hashes are specced, but haven't been implemented by anybody yet. So while it's mostly a question of the implementation, the spec will need to be tuned to respond to feedback from the compiler writers Speed: an implementation thing, although of course language design decisions influence it too Mutable grammars: needs work on both fronts. polishing: everything (compilers, specs, docs, module installers, ...) Could you briefly explain what "shaped arrays" are? I've never heard that term, and Synopsis 9 is pretty dense. Arrays where you can exactly declare the dimensionality, index ranges and types. For example you could declare a two-dimensional array where both indexes run from 0 to 2 and and only store Num objects -- the perfect base for Matrix arithmetics. Those predeclarations allow both type checking and much more compact storage. Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed	[reply]
Re^4: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6? by Anonymous Monk on Apr 12, 2012 at 03:31 UTC
If you can give a number what percentage of the spec has been implemented so far.	[reply]
Re^5: If you've tried it, what are your thoughs on Perl6? by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 12, 2012 at 08:28 UTC