chromatic

5 ms·

1.
by chromatic 2mo ago
Good project! I've been tinkering with something similar for pinball, arcade, and other coin-operated machines. Lock-in for hardware and software there is a real bummer, but managing payments and security is worth the cost.
2.
by chromatic 9mo ago
Maybe until the 2001 O'Reilly layoffs. Tim hired Larry for about 5 years, but that was mostly working on the third edition of the Camel. A handful of other Perl luminaries worked there at the same time (Jon Orwant, Nat Torkington). Whe
3.
by chromatic 9mo ago
Excellent point in the last paragraph. Python, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, and C# all have/had business models and business advocates in a way that Perl never did.
4.
by chromatic 11mo ago
This is an embarrassing context to admit, but here goes. Back when Parrot was a thing and the Perl 6 people were targeting it, I profiled the prelude of Perl 6 to optimize startup time and discovered two things: - the first basic block of t
5.
by chromatic 1y ago
I wrote the book Modern Perl by hand, and it's accurate and freely available. I wonder how much of the linked book relies on what I already wrote: https://www.modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/
6.
by chromatic 1y ago
I prefer Perl's approach for both: use v5.40; .... That's explicit, tied to a specific version, and executable code which can be scoped to a single source file. (I'd argued for that feature for years with my `M
7.
by chromatic 1y ago
I'm not aware of any published books yet, but I'd like to publish a 5th edition of Modern Perl sometime, and it will include the native object model.
8.
by chromatic 1y ago
That's fair; I appreciate it.
9.
by chromatic 1y ago
If there's more than "good editing often improves writing" I didn't see it in the essay.
10.
by chromatic 3y ago
Your understanding is mostly accurate. Perl 6 was intended from the start to be the next major release of Perl (at various times, a replacement for a 5.10 or 5.12 or 5.14), and it was intended to have a backwards compatibility mode to run 5
11.
by chromatic 3y ago
JSON::PP and Cpanel::JSON::XS don't have this problem somehow. From my reading of the documentation of the former (especially the MAPPING section), it has the same problem for the same reasons. the whole thing is a tangled mess of w
12.
by chromatic 3y ago
It's a language implementation gotcha, not really a library problem. The internal data structure used to represent values is polymorphic and uses flags to represent the types of operations performed on the represented data (numeric, st
13.
by chromatic 3y ago
That's because it didn't work reliably. There were at least a couple of situations where Perl would have had to guess which operation you were trying to perform, so the feature was a source of potential bugs.
14.
by chromatic 3y ago
I am. I released a new version of the Modern-Perl library a couple of weeks ago (apropos of this story).
15.
by chromatic 3y ago
IIRC was by and large advertised as such from the get go It was not. For many years it was advertised as the next version of Perl (with the intent being perhaps a Perl 5.10 release and then no more major releases with the 5 version number
16.
by chromatic 4y ago
someone correct me if I'm wrong but this would apply to well known interpreted languages like Perl 5 Perl uses the same execution method you describe for cPython.
17.
by chromatic 5y ago
Slashdot and its associated Everything2 site were written in Perl That really takes me back!
18.
by chromatic 5y ago
AFAICT, O'Reilly's first Ruby book was "Ruby on Rails", published 2006. O'Reilly's "The Ruby Programming Language" wasn't published until 2008. O'Reilly published Matz's Ruby in a Nut
19.
by chromatic 5y ago
You're right, that's exactly what I meant! I'm surprised there's no example in perlre(1); perhaps I can get that corrected.
20.
by chromatic 5y ago
No need to copy and then replace: my $a = 'Perl'; my $b =~ s/pe/ea/ir;
21.
by chromatic 5y ago
This is untrue.
22.
by chromatic 5y ago
Rakudo on Parrot was slow. If you happened to use a Unicode character in your source file it got dog-slow. Worse yet, Unicode was an optional feature of Parrot! WTF!! This is nonsense, and I say that as the person who spent months profi
23.
by chromatic 5y ago
That means that if you made Parrot work better the way Rakudo-on-NQP-on-Parrot was at the time, it would have been a wasted effort. Two thoughts. First, that wasn't my plan. We were actively working on the Lorito plan to reduce the
24.
by chromatic 5y ago
Parrot and Perl 6 diverged To me this reads like the "mistakes were made" phrasing used when someone wants to be technically accurate but not say anything meaningful. Regardless of whatever Raku developers and advocates say, I,
25.
by chromatic 5y ago
If Parrot had provided all that Perl 6 needed at that time, I don't think the multiple backend strategy would have been selected. Why would one? Given that the multiple backend strategy only succeeded in replacing an existing backend
26.
by chromatic 5y ago
The first thing is that Rakudo began technically shifting to a multiple backend architecture in mid 2009 Weird how almost nothing Patrick talked about in that talk panned out -- no JVM backend, no CLR backend (the one that Jonathan talked
27.
by chromatic 5y ago
That was my era too, but it's definitely true that Dan lost interest in P6 well before he stepped down, and Leo never seemed to have a specific interest in P6.
28.
by chromatic 5y ago
I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. If I recall correctly, that
29.
by chromatic 5y ago
Parrot was always intended to support multiple languages, from Simon's original April Fools joke to Larry's dual desire to run both P6 and Perl in the same process on the same VM as well as to make CPAN available to all dynamic la
30.
by chromatic 5y ago
I recall things differently! The leaders of the Parrot VM and the leaders of the P6 implementation and the P6 language designers were on the phone directly every week talking through things. Up until we weren't, but that was basically

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