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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#121

Post by rootusrootus »

I still remember a wonderful presentation by Damian Conway a number of years ago about all of the great ways Perl 6 could turn into whatever domain specific language you needed it to be. It was beautiful, I was awestruck. I've always enjoyed Perl as a language. But I walked out of that presentation thinking "That was so beautiful, and I don't want it anywhere near my business." Because the last thing I need is software written in a language I can't hire anyone else to maintain.

At some level that's what I think has happened to Perl in general. I never liked Python much, until I got forced to use it on a new team. Now I'm convinced that it has a really distinct advantage -- there aren't too many ways to write Python, so an experienced Python developer can figure out code pretty quickly. But Perl programs are frequently art pieces that take a lot of effort to truly grok.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#122

Post by Grinnz »

codeflo wrote: 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…

> First, opting in to an experimental feature could be a one-liner, “use experimental feature ‘try’” or similar. There’s no point in punishing your valuable beta testers beyond that with a second line that’s entirely redundant with the first one.

It is. "use experimental 'try';" works already.

> The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features.

This is intentional. The largest strength of Perl is that, barring significant security-type issues, a script written in 1995 will still run with the version of Perl you've installed. If you write a script with "use v5.36", you would change that version only if you intend to modernize the script with features from a newer version, and determine that such features don't break the script. This is harder to determine for some features than others, for example applying the 'unicode_strings' feature to an existing script written without it is rather perilous.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#123

Post by cestith »

rootusrootus wrote: post #121

I still remember a wonderful presentation by Damian Conway a number of years ago about all of the great ways Perl 6 could turn into whatever domain specific language you needed it to be. It was beautiful, I was awestruck. I've always enjoyed Perl as a language . But I walked out of that presentation thinking "That was so beautiful, and I don't want it anywhere near my business." Because the last thing I need is softw…

Perl6 is now of course Rakulang. https://raku.org/

The folks responsible for that are still growing and improving their own ecosystem. It's a Perl-family language but it's different enough that they stepped away from the name so both Perl and Raku can flourish.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#124

Post by haolez »

An anecdote of my career is that some programming languages attract different kinds of programmers. I've dealt with Delphi in the beginning of my career and while there was nothing wrong with the language, it seemed to attract a lot of bad programmers writing really poor code.

And Perl was the opposite of this anecdote: the most brilliant engineers I've met in my career were Perl monks, as they would call themselves. I respect Perl for that :)

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#125

Post by petre »

brightball wrote: post #76
HeckFeck wrote: post #59

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 worked on a site conversion of a 14 year old Perl site about a decade ago. The creator had build a database out of the file system leveraging Perl's parsing capabilities. Still one of the fastest sites I've ever touched in my career but the code was really hard to follow. I find that the ideal place for Perl (for me) is smaller one-offs. When used for a huge site it can get really messy.

Not if you use Mojolicious and are the tidy type.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#126

Post by cestith »

ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #61
HeckFeck wrote: post #59

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.

Teams do have conventions. There's code review. There are linters and pretty printers. There's even a standard set of default linter rules in perlcritic, taken mostly from Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices.

Perl has no problem from flexibility not shared by C, Common Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, or Ada.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#127

Post by cestith »

gwd wrote: post #19
badsectoracula wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features. Probably not much of a problem currently, but might be if releases get more frequent. But to use that new feature they'd need to modify their code anyway, so this isn't really an issue in practice, is it? > I personally like the “edition” concept of Rust a lot be…

> How is this any different from having a repeat of the python2->python3 fiasco (which, AFAIK, Perl developers are trying to avoid)? AFAIUI you can mix Rust 2015, 2018, and 2021 crates; so a developer can update their own crate to 2021, while not having to completely re-write the dependencies which are still Rust 2015. With Python 2 -> 3, my understanding was that everything had to be updated recursively. That said..…

The use pragma is scoped.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#128

Post by cutler »

cutler wrote: post #54
davorg wrote: 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.

I'll qualify that by some observations re the Ruby job situation in London which seems quite steady. Rails jobs in London in Indeed, for example have hovered around the 250 mark for many years now whilst Ruby jobs advertised are still higher than Golang. I just received an email from a recruiter listing 21 Ruby roles so it's not quite Perl yet. I also notice a high percentage of "Who Is Hiring" roles here on HN feature Ruby/Rails so maybe Ruby's fate will be as a middle-tier language with adoption just below the big guns - Python, JS, Java, C# and PHP.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#129

Post by cestith »

codeflo wrote: post #41
HelloNurse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't use the new feature without editing code to use the new feature. If you're editing code, bumping the version number at the top is trivial.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#130

Post by webmaven »

mikem170 wrote: post #71
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. We didn't use tricky or out of the ordinary syntax unless it was absolutely necessary (like unusual regex, etc), and in those cases we would document what was happen…

> It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code.

That's not the relevant test, even for fairly large teams. More important is whether someone from another team (or more critically, a brand new hire) can read and modify the code.

That said, based on what you're describing, folks from outside your team ought to get comfortable pretty quickly too .

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