111–120 of 245 posts
None of this makes sense IMO. The point of Perl 7 was not to allow breaking changes. It was to send a signal that Perl was alive and that the Perl 6 messup was behind them. Then two years later they announce that there's still no Perl 7 because they're still working on Perl 5.
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I chose to build in Perl because of its ubiquity and committment to backwards compatibility. I was extremely frustrated with existing projects having dependency issues and frequent breakage and wanted to avoid that at all costs. Perl's flexibility has allowed me to develop my own coding style, which is basically Java-like, and I rarely have trouble figuring out what something does, even months later. I think Perl is…
Unfortunately most of that doesn't really matter for any non-trivial project, because you'll almost unavoidably need a module for something. A lot of the time you'll find out that it's bit rotted 5 years ago, and the bug tracker has a 7 year old issue nobody seems to have read. It's even worse for anything that interacts with libraries or APIs -- those change over time, and often nobody does the work to repair compat…
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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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> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it. Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl. In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from thi…
I am only aware of Booking.com that is to this day mostly Perl. Do u know of any specific names?
IME, big older companies have Perl code chugging along, but not very visible. Part of this is also because there's the perception that it is hard to attract developers if the company mentions Perl any where in the job description.
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I wouldn't worry much... the reports of Perl's death have been greatly exaggerated! The blog post seems to indicate that the steering council simply wants to to avoid being bitten by Zawinski's "CADT" model. And who could blame them after seeing the kind of stunts pulled in other language communities?
CADT (the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers") is about rewrites. Jamie particularly doesn't like the habit of throwing away old bugs you didn't fix on the rationale that if they were really still a problem you should take the time to install the new program that doesn't fix them and report them again... I don't think rewrites were on the map for Perl, except arguably for Raku (Perl 6 as was) and I don't think R…
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Users do not "want to keep getting new features"; they occasionally decide to make an effort to upgrade the Perl interpreters on their servers and personal machines because they want some new features. A "use v5.36" directive is going to be very opaque for many users, but it doesn't need to be understood to serve the purpose of determining the minimum Perl version to install in order to run a certain script very effe…
If user = server administrator writing simple scripts, you are probably right. If user = a team of devs, I don’t agree. You often want to use new language features just to simplify a piece of code, and you don’t want confusing rules around when you can and can’t use them.
Neither is keeping development environment up to date and letting Perl versions on servers lapse until you install the latest Perl version because you have new Perl scripts requiring new features, or there are urgent security fixes, or you are building a new server or container anyway.
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> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it. Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl. In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from thi…
I am only aware of Booking.com that is to this day mostly Perl. Do u know of any specific names?
IMDb.
I'll speak up for Perl. I learntbit voluntarily in my own spare time and actually get a lot of delight out of the language. I like that it is very unrestrictive. The sigils make sense when you wrap your mind around them and you miss them in other languages. It is excellent at parsing text. I wrote a static site builder using Perl along with a very rudimentary templating system ( https://soft.thran.uk for the curious)…
I wouldn't worry much... the reports of Perl's death have been greatly exaggerated! The blog post seems to indicate that the steering council simply wants to to avoid being bitten by Zawinski's "CADT" model. And who could blame them after seeing the kind of stunts pulled in other language communities?
They're being bitten by the bikeshedding model instead, actively encouraging the use of the language like it's 1998. You want to live in 2022? Fine, just type
use v5.36;
I'll speak up for Perl. I learntbit voluntarily in my own spare time and actually get a lot of delight out of the language. I like that it is very unrestrictive. The sigils make sense when you wrap your mind around them and you miss them in other languages. It is excellent at parsing text. I wrote a static site builder using Perl along with a very rudimentary templating system ( https://soft.thran.uk for the curious)…
> it is very unrestrictive That makes collaboration hard. The freedom I have in putting my thoughts into code, uninhibited by syntax, types and conventions makes it nearly impossible for others to understand and modify my work.