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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

101–110 of 245 posts

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#101
post #56
post #20

Ah Perl! The old friend, you can always rely on to do quick scripting work. I've written non-trivial quantities of Perl in the past, and maintained other people's Perl code too. Contrary to popular opinion, I've always found it easy to maintain. I still call upon Perl to do open(FILEHANDLE, $file) or die; while( ){ .... } close(FILEHANDLE) Sort of work. These days I do good deal of work in Python. Python itself has b…

Examples? I don't recognise anything Perlish in Python. Ruby, yes, but not Python.

f-strings are quite perlish IMV.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#102

I'm curious to know if anyone out there building new systems in Perl or is it all just maintenance mode for Perl based systems?

I've built a few (small) things in Perl recently:

a) iCalendar and timezone pre-processing for an Arduino alarm clock; Arduino libraries aren't up to the task (and neither am I! recurring events with recurring exceptions is kind of complex), but cpan iCal libraries and timezone libraries seem to work.

b) personally monitoring script, checks a bunch of stuff and sends email (well, cron sends the email, really) if problems persist for long enough

c) something to fetch my DSL sync speed and status (uses Net::Telnet), which feeds into the monitor script, but also used to adjust bandwidth limits for fq_codel to reduce bufferbloat.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#103
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async Nonsense, there's AnyEvent, EV, IO::Async, Mojo::IOLoop. If you need parallelism, yes, you'd better use Go or something else. And the 10 years old bugs are to a large extent an exageration, because those modules are probably abandoned and you shouldn't use them anyway.

> Nonsense, there's AnyEvent, EV, IO::Async, Mojo::IOLoop My experience with all of these has been that they've been frustrating to work with, and general support for them in the broader ecosystem is lacking and mutually incompatible. > those modules are probably abandoned and you shouldn't use them anyway. Yes, that's the point, the ecosystem is now lacking because of the number of abandoned modules (even for quite…

Mojo::IOLoop is quite lean and straightforward to work with, but it's quite minimal. If I'd pick something, I'd probably pick this one as the decision to use Mojolicious was very rewarding.

AnyEvent is harder because it uses closures everywhere but it works really nicely otherwise. It's not endorsed by some in the Perl community because the author insists that it doesn't need a license and chooses to develop it and track bugs on his own infrastructure. EV is developed by the same author and it requires a compiler, it can be plugged into AnyEvent. They're both very good quality.

IO::Async is a different event loop brought to you by the people that do not endorse AnyEvent but are involved with Perl 5 development. I haven't used it, but it has a large number of active bugs on RT, plus past criticism from the author of AnyEvent.

There's also POE which we use but it's possibly on life support and you probably wouldn't want to use it unless you want to live in callback hell, so I fully understand your frustration if you've actually tried it. We use POE in a critical part of our infrastructure and has worked fine, but that part is quite frustrating to maintain. Futher criticism of this event framework could be found here:

https://metacpan.org/pod/AnyEvent::Impl::POE

As a sidenote, I'm curreny working with Ruby's Async:IO which is a breath of fresh air compared to other event loops that I've worked with in the past.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#104
post #69
post #11

I’ve written a nontrivial anount of Perl code in my life, admittedly almost none in the last decade. For all its obvious flaws, I always liked the language, and am happy to see it getting attention and moving forward. Having said that, I think this might be too fine-grained. First, opting in to an experimental feature could be a one-liner, “use experimental feature ‘try’” or similar. There’s no point in punishing you…

Seems like they could just lock all of the new features behind a “use x.x” line rather than going feature-by-feature. And they could include “use latest” or similar for people who don’t care about the risk and are fine just fixing things if they break.

No, that is what they are doing. "use v7;" gets you all the new stuff and that will continue going forward. They only listed what "use v7;" is the equivalent of in the article.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#105
It says Larry Wall isn't working on Perl anymore. When did that happen? It looks like the Perl6 thing was announced in 2000 and around 2010 Larry Wall deleted the Perl page from his blog (it's been a 404 link ever since)

- https://web.archive.org/web/20100214124540/http://www.wall.o...

- http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html

That butterfly was the worst. Perl would have been better served having an animal like the honeybadger as its logo.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#106
post #20

Ah Perl! The old friend, you can always rely on to do quick scripting work. I've written non-trivial quantities of Perl in the past, and maintained other people's Perl code too. Contrary to popular opinion, I've always found it easy to maintain. I still call upon Perl to do open(FILEHANDLE, $file) or die; while( ){ .... } close(FILEHANDLE) Sort of work. These days I do good deal of work in Python. Python itself has b…

the same stuff happened long time ago with ruby. I mean, not exactly the same stuff, ruby was perl-inspired from the start.

Nowadays instead of `perl -lne` oneliners I usually make `ruby -lne` oneliners, just for a chance my coworkers could make sense of them.

let's celebrate perl at least for native support of utf-8 strings before it was cool.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#107
I still love Perl as essentially a low-level abstraction layer for C. I can get so much done at the system level without having to compile a bunch of code every time I make a small change.

I've heard that Python (and maybe some others) are slowly replacing Perl as a "subsystem" of Linux, but I doubt that will happen before I retire. So, until then, TIMTOWTDI!

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#108

Can anyone advocate here their thoughts to "must use" Perl for any scripts / projects?

I haven't seen frameworks in other languages rival mojolicious for rapid prototyping, web scraping, and good event-driven support. It's super easy to make websockets and even quickly have unit tests. Mojolicious still has 0 external dependencies and is rock solid and very scalable. The simplicity is just very nice compared to, for instance, frameworks in which lots of code generation is involved just to get started.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#109
post #54
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a London-based freelancer specialising in Perl, I can tell you that the number of companies developing new systems in Perl is tiny (like, maybe, half a dozen). Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.

I think Ruby is heading in the same direction.

Ruby is so great. I don't understand why this is occurring.
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