I love Perl 6 but I utterly reject and hate the Fisher Price look and feel. It makes it impossible to have a serious conversation at work about Perl 6 or get anyone less than light hearted to care about taking a look at the language. There is so much great stuff there, and basically none of it is for children. I'd go as far to say as Perl 6 would be an awful language for very young children. Something like Scratch has put the effort in there. The idea of Camelia being friendly to kids is a great sentiment... but thats as deep as anyone's effort or considerations have gone for children learning to program in the Perl 6 community. IMHO anyone who feels that's a harsh assessment has probably never attempted to teach programming to young children, I have! It's a near impossible task, and the last thing you touch is syntax or documentation websites. I cant help but feel Camelia and her scheming colours are ham stringing adoption by anyone else looking in from their cubicle or startup loft. Maybe I'm very wrong and everyone loves the bug?
> anyway, that's just the .org site; other sites can have dreary corporate logos if they like :)
http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2011-09-15#i_4432065
I'm pretty sure diakopter owns perl6.com; maybe approach him?
I want the language given a chance based on its merits, not dismissed because of a cartoonish site.
Who wouldn't be excited about learning R after visiting the website!
Note: I'm not bashing Perl here - developers using any language can create unmaintainable code. The move towards producing enterprise-level software has included increasing salaries to the point where professional software engineers can be hired along with adopting architectural principles that are conducive to producing large-scale software.
Especially when they conflate two completely different languages to boot.
There's nothing to take away here other than "some people are beyond being helped".
I wouldn't worry too much about that. I'd rather build awesome things in Perl 6 better, faster and more productively than in any other language.
Those who don't use it have much to lose than those who do.
If the same template is re used for Perl 6, it would work just wonderfully fine.
The background being of a butterfly specimen display, realistic and in faint grey, and one of the butterflies in full colour with the label Perl 6. The other butterflies can even be labelled as other programming languages, like Perl 5 or C or whatever.
The only way these kind of knee-jerk reactions get dismantled over time is to ignore the nay-sayers and prove them wrong. And being in a profession where logic is valued, a lot of people here should know better.
FWIW, Russ Cox's GitHub icon[1] is similarly scary to me.
2. Liking Go != liking the mascot
3. I think most would agree this is ridiculous: https://www.googlemerchandisestore.com/Google+Redesign/Brand...
Discussion Highlights =====================
From: Larry Wall Date: March 24, 2009 10:25 Subject: Re: Logo considerations
[...] I think there's a tendency to go way too abstract in most of these proposals. I want something with gut appeal on the order of Tux. In particular I want a logo for Perl 6 that is:
Fun
Cool
Cute
Named
Lively
Punable
Personal
Concrete
Symmetric
Asymmetric
Attractive
Relational
Metamorphic
Decolorizable
Shrinkable to textual icon
Shrinkable to graphical icon
Hence, Camelia.
Larry
Larry kinda went, "NO IT"S THIS." and there was Camelia.
Honestly, Camelia is just slightly worse than the redesign of The Life Aquatic Flag/Logo. Which itself was funny, as this was from a comedy [1].
[0] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/01/msg9...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Life+Aquatic+with+Steve+...
I was under the impression that Larry was banned from being in involved in the implementation of Perl 6. ;)
I kinda saw that logo and gave up the idea of helping. It was just so horrible as to defy logic.
Still love Perl and I think a butterfly is a great idea - and even this is a good as a start, but it's not a strong enough logo for people to have careers depend upon. Like me. It doesn't even tick all the checkboxes that Larry had. If you made this logo in an intro design class in art school, you'd be ridiculed.
[0] http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2009/03/msg9...
I might perceive this differently because of my cultural background, but isn't it a bit misandric to claim masculinity as unsensitive?
Tom Cooks
* Something a programming language with wide use would ever adopt, past, present, or future
* ..and is misogynistic in any way
What the hell is that sentence directed at?
(I've opened an issue.)
Update: Fixed now.
(sorry, cheap shot. I like Perl really)
The real question is whether python3 can avoid the same fate...
Python 3 really is almost 7 years old and it is moving forward. The Wall of Shame has become the Wall of Super Powers. The scope for Python 3 was different than Perl 6.
Perl 6 was to be ageless and for all time. Python 3 was a fix to a broken issues in Python 2 having redundant ways to do things.
> Python 3.0 was developed with the same philosophy as in prior versions. However, as Python had accumulated new and redundant ways to program the same task, Python 3.0 had an emphasis on removing duplicative constructs and modules, in keeping with "There should be one— and preferably only one —obvious way to do it". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python
I don't mind there being more than one way to do things.
The biggest of the three big items remaining in Perl 6 development before GA has been completed, give or take. (The Great List Refactor) I'm not 100% sure of the status of the other two, but I think the Unicode stuff is also well on its way as well.
My prediction is that he will be announcing some kind of Perl 6 1.0 pre-release this evening.
Given that Perl 5 has been helping me pay my bills for the past 22 years, I'm more than a little excited!
I recall a few months ago that a hand full of the benchmarks on JVM were actually running faster than Perl 5.latest, though most were slower.
Perl 6 is far, far more optimizable than Perl 5, and also most similar languages. The long-term focus on correct first is finally paying off.
Fit your tutorial to the desired age of your audience. If something is a virtual machine just start your tutorial calling it 'our virtual machine'. Explain briefly what is a virtual machine, instead to say that is a butterfly with violet wings or something (not everybody knows what to do with this stuff). If is a compiler, call it compiler and go as quick as possible to the next step of the tutorial before to lose the interest of your audience. Is not 'how is named' or 'how cute', is 'what can you do with it' and 'how to use it with the other pieces' what matters.
If you want to use names, at least try to be consistent with the names and designs. If you want to name something 'rakudo' and want to show your sensitive side, great, name the other thing 'sazanka' or so. Something nice, humble, but useful at the same time. Something that can helps you to make a mental image of the whole picture of this 'paradise' landscape in a couple of seconds.
I read Perl tutorial, its like reading an essay. Not telling you the straight to the point answer. Perl tutorial really bad.
I mean, it's not that much different than all the new changes to C++ in the last 10 years (compared to the C++ from 10 years ago).
Yeah, there are a bunch of new things, but it still looks Perlish to me.
Funny thing about Perl 6 syntax and feature are reinvented the wheel all over again like Perl 6 'gather' and 'take' syntax, Only Perl 6 have that syntax. A lot of Reinventing the wheel in syntax and feature make Perl 6 a very bad language.
- Would be nice to make the intro copy more informative. Like: why would I want to use it as a developer? What does it look like compared to my favorite language?
- Really like the examples, especially since I haven't done much with Perl 6. However, like Perl 5, it still looks like parseable line noise to the untrained eye. Would be nice to have some better explanations to go along with the code. Maybe not right on the homepage, but at least linked into it.
- Would like to see the "For Newcomers" links on the "Documentation" page on the homepage.
That said though, none of this is going to matter unless there's a good tutorial. Nothing currently available is cutting it as a tutorial.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090901185334/http://perl6.org/
