2016 - On The Shoulders Of Giants - Damian Conway
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an entertaining, technically masterful showcase of what Perl 6 can do.
What it is
Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2016 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec xaduha · 2016-07 · on “Interview with Larry Wall”
With all due respect to Larry Wall he shouldn't be a source of info or inspiration when it comes to Perl6. Watch this instead, it's pretty damn great [this video]
Strong rec raiph · 2019-08 · on “Ask HN: Is Perl 5 or Perl 6 still worth learning in 2019?”
Of course. (For some people.) Here are some videos to give a flavor of the last few years of Perl 6 as it graduated from alpha in 2014 to beta in 2015 to the first ready for production releases of the Rakudo compiler in 2016, to outsiders doing videos about it in 2019 (last video). * 2014. "There's this question of belief". 30 seconds. Charming point made by Perl creator Larry Wall (during a long talk). [LINK] * 2014. "My first P6 program". 3 minute "lightning talk" presentation to an audience of Perl folk. P5er Stefan Seifert shows what they learned and pulled off less than 24 hours after first writing P6 code. (This start led to [LINK] ) [LINK] * 2015. "P5 Pigs". 6 minute "lightning talk"
Strong rec raiph · 2021-07 · on “To compute a constant of calculus (2019)”
Right, yes, for continued fractions / convergent series, floats are almost certainly going to be a complete disaster whereas if only integer division is involved, as is the case with this series, then arbitrary precision rationals are going to be exact, and often sufficiently performant for most such series for results up to about 15 decimal digits or so. Damian demonstrates this difference between using floats and arbitrary precision rationals when he shows code for computing Bernoulli numbers in his "On The Shoulders Of Giants" presentation.[0] (Btw, if you care about programming and appreciate a combination of total technical and geek mastery with standup comic delivery, the whole thing i
Recommends VLM · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
Aside from the typical, I watched Damian Conway "Standing on the shoulders of giants" from YAPC 2016 last week and found it interesting. Always fun to see a modern feature full language collide with history and algorithms. [this video]
Recommends zoffix222 · 2016-11 · on “Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?”
To me, it's mostly the presence of all new CS inventions in core. Like you don't need any damn libraries to paralellize stuff, just use `start` block or a `supply`. If you write accounting software, you'll appreciate built-in rationals so that 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3, unlike so many other languages. Laziness is present in many things like lazy exceptions, string generation, and sequences: say (3, 9 … ∞)[^20] does not hang and produces (3 9 15 21 27 33 39 45 51 57 63 69 75 81 87 93 99 105 111 117), despite being an infinite sequence. You also have grammars, more readable regex language, and superb object model. On a more advanced spectrum, with grammars and slangs, you can craft your own mini-langua
Cites raiph · 2018-12 · on “Haskell to Perl 6”
> The examples vs Haskell are not helping me understand. Personally I don't think the added verbosity is helping in any way. It doesn't sound to me like you are the right audience for the document you're reading. Quoting from that page: > this should not be mistaken for a beginner tutorial or overview of Perl 6; it is intended as a technical reference for Perl 6 learners with a strong Haskell background. It is not wise to start with a technical reference unless you are already fairly well versed in the basics of the technology you're learning and are motivated to deepen your knowledge of it. If you are interested in P6 you should start with overview or beginner material. Then, if you have a