Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

Language is a tool. Certainly, some people will create literature and others are merely hacks. Some languages will be conceptually cleaner, some more pure, and some an amalgam of expressions "borrowed" from other languages.

No, Virginia, Perl is not dead. Not as long as there is more than one way to do it, or a hacker trying to finish something that was due yesterday.

Perl, as we know it, might pass from this earth. But the spirit it embodied, that first we should use duct tape to build on the work of others then write glue to make it stick, that getting-things-done was the primary goal --- this is too close to the core of our restless selves. A thousand years from now, there will be some startup somewhere with an urgent need and a hacker that strokes his chin and says, "I think I could write that in Perl[1]..."

[1] replace "perl" with your favorite language. Pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes means "the tool you are most familiar with", but that says more about you than about the language.

> Where are the new Perl programmers – in bulk – going to come from?

The world of non-programmers, same as always.

Wikipedia: As of 2009, multiple Perl 6 implementations are under development, but none are considered "complete". As noted in the history section the language design itself is still subject to change. No implementation will be designated as the official Perl 6 implementation; rather, "Perl 6 is anything that passes the official test suite."[12]

If that's changed, you should probably go update that. "Pre-release" is generally understood as a synonym for "not complete", right? There's no complete, finished implementation of the Perl 6 spec, right? Is the spec itself finished?

It's like you can't say anything about Perl (either one) on Hacker News, not even mildly complimentary things, without someone jumping on perceived slights.

> If that's changed, you should probably go update that.

If that weren't against Wikipedia policies, I would. Then again, I don't consider Perl 5 "complete" either, whatever "complete" means.

> There's no complete, finished implementation of the Perl 6 spec, right? Is the spec itself finished?

No to both, but why does that matter? There'll be a Perl 6.1 spec and a Perl 6.2 spec and so on. Meanwhile, people who find a Perl 6 implementation usable for their purposes will use it and people who don't won't. Fortunately, every release is more usable to more people.

As for "pre-release", I don't believe in playing linguistic existential games. Software exists or it doesn't. You've released it or you haven't. It does something or it doesn't. Perpetual betas and alphas and pre-releases and unstable versions and (even) release candidates are for people who lack the courage to release good software.

As for "perceived slights", insinuating that Perl 6 doesn't exist or isn't useful because the spec isn't "complete" (whatever that means) or no single implementation is "finished" (whatever that means) or no one has said "This particular release of this particular implementation is stable for every domain and every purpose and everyone who might ever want to use it" is awfully silly and (in my mind) deserves a challenge.

My experience is nearly the opposite, Modern Perl for me is a wonderful language to write web applications in. Nearly everybody I speak with regularly is developing some web based application in Perl. Then again thats what I do for a living so my glasses are definitely rose tinted.

Sites like the BBC iPlayer system, and Omni Hotel's booking application are large public examples of Perl applications, Magazines.com is another. At the smaller end of the fence I worked on ParkingMobility.com, a REST system written in Perl with multi-platform clients (including iPhone), was written using Catalyst and the KiokuDB Object Persistence engine.

You have moved on, but so has Perl. Moose for example has had heavy influences from OCaml, Scala, CLOS, Smalltalk, and others. It provides anywhere from "some" (Moose has Type Constraints but not inferencing for example) to much if not more (Moose's implementation of Traits can provide state unlike Scala's from what I know) of the features of other languages.

The rivalry between Perl5 and Perl6 means that more and more of these features will be expressed. For example, I've seen some proof of concept code for implementing Moose's type system at the core language level (my Int $i = 'One'; # boom!). With a properly motivated hacker and the right direction this could turn into an excellent dynamic type system, or even a semi-static system similar to the one Perl6 is implementing. Having this kind of a type system makes lot of Web programming tasks much simpler to implement (and eliminates a whole range of security holes).

The current momentum in the community has me very excited for the future of Perl.