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Perl 5.26.0 released

nntp.perl.org

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#21

Post by walshemj »

rglullis wrote: post #6
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them. To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing o…

I still think CPAN has more coverage than the equivalent in python

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#22

Post by walshemj »

krylon wrote: post #15
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

I don't use Perl for anything that I suspect will amount to more than 1,000 lines of code. But for smaller scripts that automate tedious tasks or massage data to connect two otherwise software systems or generate a report-ish overview of a database/table, it is very hard to beat. Ruby comes close, but then again, Perl has been relentlessly optimized and fine-tuned over the last ~15 years, so for the stereotypical use…

and I think it has replaces a lot of code that back in the day would have been written in, bash sed and awk

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#23

Post by collyw »

0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

I moved from Perl to python around 6 years ago. There are more jobs available for Python, though probably more competition as well.

I regularly see Perl jobs posted in London, but the wages are surprisingly poor, compared to what I could get for my Django knowledge.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#24

Post by latenightcoding »

rurban wrote: post #13
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

I wouldn't call it impressive. 2 months too late, too many bugs, horrible security, not much improvements, still doing more destruction than good. Compare it to the "non-community" professional effort https://github.com/perl11/cperl/releases/tag/cperl-5.26.0 http://perl11.org/cperl/perl5260cdelta.html regular expressions are much better with pcre2, which almost work (50% faster) with https://metacpan.org/pod/re::engi…

FYI rurban is a well known Perl programmer who hates almost everyone.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#25

Post by liotier »

sverhagen wrote: post #4
tete wrote: post #2

Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me. Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

> I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so.

Whenever I think of something that has anything to do with batch data munging, there is usually half a dozen Perl modules that already do it. I have no opinion about Perl as a language but I like how rich the ecosystems is for that sort of project.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#27

Post by dagw »

thinkMOAR wrote: post #10
rglullis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them. To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing o…

Why do you think unix sysadmin function is dying? Just curious.

As an ex-sysadmin I find that a lot of what I used to be responsible for is now outsourced to "the cloud" and most of my old tasks are being handled by other people as a secondary responsibility. Back when I started it wasn't uncommon for a 20-50 man company to have a dedicated sysadmin, whereas now I hardly ever see that.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#28

Post by forinti »

krylon wrote: post #15
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

I don't use Perl for anything that I suspect will amount to more than 1,000 lines of code. But for smaller scripts that automate tedious tasks or massage data to connect two otherwise software systems or generate a report-ish overview of a database/table, it is very hard to beat. Ruby comes close, but then again, Perl has been relentlessly optimized and fine-tuned over the last ~15 years, so for the stereotypical use…

Exactly. I have dozens of scripts in production and most are 30 lines or less. Most of them read various files and load them into our databases. I do this in perl, because I can cook them up in minutes. Java, which is the official language around here, is just too much of a bother.

This week I realised that a script I wrote about ten years ago has become an indispensable part of my company's infrastructure: it converts Office documents to PDF using OLE. It's about 30 lines long of very clear code.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#29

Post by rurban »

falsedan wrote: post #19
rurban wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it impressive. 2 months too late, too many bugs, horrible security, not much improvements, still doing more destruction than good. Compare it to the "non-community" professional effort https://github.com/perl11/cperl/releases/tag/cperl-5.26.0 http://perl11.org/cperl/perl5260cdelta.html regular expressions are much better with pcre2, which almost work (50% faster) with https://metacpan.org/pod/re::engi…

Reini, aren't you the sole dev working on cperl, the fork you set up because you disagreed with some of the patchs perl-porters accepted/rejected?

A single +1 developer is better than -5 developers. cperl got 10x more done in 2 years than p5p in 15 years, and the 10x factor is ongoing. In a few years nobody will use perl5 anymore, everybody will use cperl instead.

I didn't only disagree with some patches, I disagree with most of the feature decisions, management and bugfix handling. And esp. with their negative track record. perl5 deserves a properly managed project and the perl6 features, so I did it. At an important time, with :const, types and signatures upcoming. And perl5 should not be used in public services due to its lack of security (I am warning against it since 5.16), not talking about the feature mishandling.

See the perl11 blog.

Some numbers: In the last 2 years, p5p produced 12005 commits (2 releases), whilst I produced 6291 commits. That's >30%. The 2nd most prolific author did 3104 (unicode), the third 1689. And I squash commits into features and bugfixes and don't spread it out over 3-5 postfixes, because cperl works in branches, not posting directly to master. Of those 6291 commits you have nothing in perl5, but they continue to play stupid and take nothing. Features wise and security fixes it's more like 1000%, not 30%.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#30

Post by rurban »

latenightcoding wrote: post #24
rurban wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it impressive. 2 months too late, too many bugs, horrible security, not much improvements, still doing more destruction than good. Compare it to the "non-community" professional effort https://github.com/perl11/cperl/releases/tag/cperl-5.26.0 http://perl11.org/cperl/perl5260cdelta.html regular expressions are much better with pcre2, which almost work (50% faster) with https://metacpan.org/pod/re::engi…

FYI rurban is a well known Perl programmer who hates almost everyone.

I'm not hating anyone. I'm warning about the destructive work of 5 major p5p committers, who ran down the project. They are the haters and trolls, who are doing the name calling. and doing the destruction to the code base.

I'm the one who is fixing the mess.

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