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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#131

Post by cestith »

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…

>> I know many experienced Unix people hate this trend, but there’s a reason some of the most actively evolving language ecosystems install more and more of their binaries into the user’s home directory. Maybe that’s already the case for Perl, I wouldn’t know.

There's https://perlbrew.pl/ and there's cpanm with "use lib".

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#132

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #75
cesarb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page should have "24th December 2015" for the Perl 6 release date, because it was not skipped, it was actually released. See the Perl 6 release announcement at https://web.archive.org/web/20151225055622/https://perl6adve... and Perl 6 download page at https://web.archive.org/web/20160208204149/http://perl6.org/... (for Perl 6 release 2016.01, there were other releases later). It only appears to have been skipped…

The OP "What happened to Perl 7" doesn't say anything about Perl 6! I'm still confused about what happened to Perl 6! "replaced with it's new name" -- googling, that's "raku". So... what was going to be Perl 6 is considered a different language, and not particularly compatible with Perl. But "Perl 7" is meant to be less of a departure? It is weird OP left Perl 6 out of the story of "what happened to Perl 7". I guess…

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#133

Post by tialaramex »

dinom wrote: post #115
tialaramex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When speaking colloquially, making a distincntion between a "rewrite" and a "language evolution strategy" sounds like nit-picking to me.

Sure, Jamie is concerned about the practical consequences. If your response to Jamie's 2019 bug report about X in WordCount was to close the ticket because you rewrote WordCount as WordCounter even though you've got no reason to think that might fix X, that's CADT. You are wasting his time. Don't use a "bug tracker" this way just write "This is broken garbage, I don't care" so that people know what's up.

I don't see that nonsense with the programming languages. Even something egregious like provenance. There's a problem, neither C nor C++ make any actual sense on a vaguely modern computer as described if pointers are just machine addresses. So the compilers invented "pointer provenance" to explain why what they actually do is reasonable - but no such fix is actually endorsed in the Standards. A defect report was raised in, I think, 2003. But it was never repaired. Nobody is under the impression that C++ 11 magically means this doesn't count, they didn't fix the problem, it's still there, and in C++ 14 and C++ 17 and C++ 20. It's even there retrospectively (this seems to be controversial for some reason but it's obviously true) in C89 we just didn't realise.

Under CADT the C++ committee would say, well, C++ 20 is new, you need to write a new defect report if you claim it's still broken. But they don't suffer CADT, their problems are altogether different.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#134

Post by cestith »

perlperson wrote: post #108
jzer0cool wrote: post #32

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.

Mojolicious is being brought to JavaScript, too. The intent is to have the same basic framework in both languages.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#135

Post by smcl »

cesarb wrote: post #72
smcl wrote: post #51

If you're interested in the story behind why some languages and specs (PHP 6 and IPv5 and a few others) appear have skipped a major version number I wrote a little bit about them: https://blog.mclemon.org/missing-version-numbers

That page should have "24th December 2015" for the Perl 6 release date, because it was not skipped, it was actually released. See the Perl 6 release announcement at https://web.archive.org/web/20151225055622/https://perl6adve... and Perl 6 download page at https://web.archive.org/web/20160208204149/http://perl6.org/... (for Perl 6 release 2016.01, there were other releases later). It only appears to have been skipped…

It's a matter of personal taste I think - I might change it to say "Now called 'Raku'". Also it's worth remembering that at the time I wrote the article there were plenty of blog posts and articles about Perl/Raku floating around. I wanted to briefly summarise it and use it as a way to look into the other ones which had been bouncing around in my head.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#136

Post by readme »

dale_glass wrote: post #43
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

list of perl modules in cpan sorted by last update time

http://www.cpan.org/modules/01modules.mtime.html

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#137

Post by cutler »

davorg wrote: post #91
weatherlite wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will take awhile for Ruby to reach that state (if at all), 15 years at least I'd say. The reality is many companies are built on Ruby and rewrites are hard. Stripe, Shopify, Github, Gitlab and the list goes on. Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it. But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact beca…

> 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 think Perl lost to Ruby because of Rails. Whilst Perl had a couple of web frameworks - Catalyst, Mojolicious and Dancer - they never gained anywhere near the traction of Rails. I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks. Catalyst gained a little adoption at a few big companies but it was hobbled by dependence on mod_perl which had a much riskier memory mode for hosting companies than mod_php. Perl was also a bit late shedding its mod_perl legacy by which time Ruby had Rack and Python had WSGI. Despite the brilliant work of Miyagawa it was game over by the time PSGI and Plack appeared.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#138

Post by readme »

xupybd wrote: post #29
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I found Perl suffered from dependency issues as well. Not the language but the modules you tend to want to use. Especially when they're underpinned by c libraries. I'd preference operating system libraries then fall back to Cpan. Over time it got harder to maintain older applications as the libraries dropped out of repositories. Have you found anything similar?

python also has this problem

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#139

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cutler wrote: post #113
unixhero wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. It's VHS trumping Betamax all over again. Few things irk me more than Pythonistas crowing over their world dominance but if you look at the top 3 languages - Python, JS & Java - it's clear that language design counts for nothing.

I think it's largely because of Ruby's deep association with Rails. This is nothing against Rails, per se, but so many people only think of Ruby in association with it that they just never reach for it in other contexts. Personally, I think Ruby is a great utility scripting language, really good for the sort of small projects that many people would probably have used Perl for two decades ago.

(Having said that, I suspect that the Ruby community's love of "first, install a Ruby version manager" does it no favors when it comes to adoption for these sorts of small projects, although the same is arguably true of Python.)

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#140

Post by justinator »

dale_glass wrote: post #79
jrochkind1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP "What happened to Perl 7" doesn't say anything about Perl 6! I'm still confused about what happened to Perl 6! "replaced with it's new name" -- googling, that's "raku". So... what was going to be Perl 6 is considered a different language, and not particularly compatible with Perl. But "Perl 7" is meant to be less of a departure? It is weird OP left Perl 6 out of the story of "what happened to Perl 7". I guess…

Long ago (~year 2000), Perl 6 was announced with great fanfare. Larry Wall set out to start producing a bunch of specs ("Apocalypses", "Synopses" and "Exegeses"), while a bunch of people set out coding. Then two things went wrong. First, the Perl 6 development had bad project management. According to the reports, the culture attracted experimentalists with interesting ideas, but didn't get along with boring people wh…

Meanwhile, Perl 5 development continued in the background, and they decided that it'd jump version from 5 to 7 to avoid confusion. Perl 7 is the direct descendant of Perl 5, with the same syntax, new features and very few deprecated things.

Did you read the FA? They decided that, "Yeah nevermind: we're not going to call it Perl 7 ", until some future time where it may make sense to do so to somebody again - but maybe not, who knows? Backwards compatibility, everyone!

I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.

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