[7thaccount]

Hey Ovid. I'm curious...if P6 had been performant and production worthy enough for your tau-station game, how much easier would the project be than with P5 + Moose? Just curious...I remember you saying years ago that you would've used it if you could've at the time.

[Ovid]

The https://taustation.space/ game runs great on Perl 5, but yes, with a robust Perl 6, many things would have been easier to implement. But by "robust" I don't mean just the language—I also mean the ecosystem.

There is no DBIx::Class (or related schema loader) for Perl 6. I don't know how mature the web frameworks are. Or even basic stuff like Excel reader/writers (we use lots of Excel for backend data analysis).

On the other hand, most of the async stuff we currently use can be thrown out. With raku's gradual typing, our in-house type libraries can be tossed out. Our local modules for making it easier to write clean procedural and OO code could be thrown out.

And the raku code would be far more concise and easy to read. Here's a simple Point object in Moose:

    package Point {
        use Moose;
        use overload '""' => \&Str, fallback => 1;
        use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;
        subtype "PointLimit" => as 'Num'
            => where   { $_ >= -10 && $_ <= 10 }
            => message { "$_ must be a Num between -10 and 10, inclusive" };

        has [qw/x y/] => (
            is       => 'rw',
            isa      => 'PointLimit',
            required => 1,
        );

        sub Str {
            my $self = shift;
            return sprintf "[%f,%f]" => $self->x, $self->y;
        }
    }

raku:

    class Point {
        subset PointLimit of Rat where -10.0 .. 10.0;
        has PointLimit $.x is rw is required;
        has PointLimit $.y is rw is required;
    }

And for those who don't "grok" the above, here it is in Python 3, just so you can see how clean raku's OO syntax is:

    class PointLimit:
        def __init__(self, name):
            self.name =  name
        def __get__(self, point, owner):
            return point.__dict__.get(self.name)
        def __set__(self, point, value):
            if not -10 < value < 10:
                raise ValueError('Value %d is out of range' % value)
            point.__dict__[self.name] = value

    class Point:
        x = PointLimit('x');
        y = PointLimit('y');

        def __init__(self, x, y):
            self.x = x
            self.y = y

        def __str__(self):
            return "[%f,%f]" % (self.x, self.y)

[snapdangle]

It's worth checking out the Red ORM, great progress is being made and it feels very Perl 6 native in terms of its semantics.

[Ovid]

Red looks interesting. Though I don't like the mapping of tables to "model". In general, I find that a model should be a consumer of an ORM, not the ORM itself. Otherwise, you expose to much to the business layer and it's harder to refactor.

For example, if you have a column on table A and you later need to move that to table B, a clean model can encapsulate that change. Hard to do when the ORM is being treated directly as the model.

[hirihoto]

Try Xoos. Red also uses a meta model syntax for extra ugliness.

[7thaccount]

Thanks for the detailed reply Ovid!

I'm only a novice in Perl5 land (Python is usually my go-to along with Linux CLI tools and Powershell on Windows, or honestly a lot of SQL these days but sometimes I reach for Perl5 when it has something I need) but I always keep an eye out for different and interesting technologies and Perl6 is definitely on my radar to check in on every now and then. As you've pointed out, it seems to have a lot of power that could reduce a lot of the one-off scripts I write. I do a lot of basic text file manipulation and any feature that can save me time is valuable even if there is more stuff to learn. To me, Perl6 appears to allow for writing beautifully succinct and readable OO, Imperative, or FP like code. However, if I just need to wrangle some data (throwaway code) it looks like it can be for text what APL is for arrays (a powerful Swiss army knife).

On another note, while I have you here, do you ever plan on putting out another Perl book, but one on Perl 6 (I know there are several already published).