141–150 of 245 posts
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?
Perl seems to still be fairly popular with the OpenBSD folk, since a Perl installation comes with the base system. It seems to be pretty much the scripting language of choice when simple Shell scripts don't do the job or are too slow.
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> 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..…
Your last two paragraphs describe Rust’s process differently than I would in comparison to this suggestion. First, significant new language features are introduced all the time, even in stable, all of them enabled by default (indeed, there’s no way to turn them off). Nightly’s #![feature(…)] is strictly for experimental stuff that is buggy and/or will change until stable release. I’m sure you know this, but all of th…
Anyway, on practice they didn't work like that.
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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…
I admit I only skimmed it, I was busy at the time. But it's not too incorrect anyway: Perl 7 will be a direct descendant of Perl 5, whenever that happens.
> 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.
I don't think there's a general "Perl community". I mean it's a thing that exists, but as I see it, it's a smaller and tighter group than the general set of people using Perl. There were lots of people that used Perl for whatever needs they had and were never regulars at conventions, Perlmonks and other places, and as a result had little influence and weren't up to date on what the core people were doing.
Many of those also had no interest in committing to such a thing. Eg, they were writing stuff for their day job, and had little interest in participating in the development of the language.
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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…
Actually, it is not weird when you consider what the article is about. The announcement of Perl 7 was not about Perl 6, it was about Perl 5. Perl 6 had been already been renamed to Raku almost a year prior (Oct '19, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl). Well, OK, it was about Perl 6 in the sense that newer versions of Perl 5 could not be called Perl 6, but that's about all. Raku/Perl 6 is a related but different language (hence the rename).
I suspect the Perl Steering Council was writing mostly to people who are focused on Perl 5. The announcement about bumping Perl 5 to version 7 created some controversy (centered on what the changes to Perl 5 would be for the bump to version 7). This led to the new governance structure discussed in the article, but it also kind of left people in the Perl 5 community hanging. A lot of them were thinking things like "OK, so are we going to bump to version 7 now, or not?" I think that is what they were trying to address. And anyone who is focused on Perl 5 already knows all about Perl 6/Raku, so there is little reason to bring it up in this article.
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> 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.
How you use or abuse that freedom is entirely your choice.
The issue with the "DSL" is the third letter in the abbreviation: LANGUAGE. A language isn't just a specification of syntax. A language is a collective shared understanding between a sufficiently large number of people. Without that, it is a dead language.
Socially in programming, programming languages need to align to real-world concepts, because that is what enables the language to be understood by new adopters. And converging on those shared meanings is hard, because designers and lingo makers can't anticipate all the variations of understanding people will have.
Learning a language is hard. So every DSL I've encountered invariably forces me to be the compiler: what is this being translated into language-wise and what does it convert to. That is a big load, so your DSL better provide power and convenience to deserve it.
DSLs also run headlong into NIH/creator's advantage. The people/person that make the DSL and implement it will know it FAR better than any adopter will. And documentation is always lacking. So what is blindingly obvious to the core practitioners is very much not so to the noob.
You are limited by the average intelligence of the programmer at a cultural level. The lone mad scientist may produce amazing ideas, but all the groundbreaking technology happens because an army of people can be coordinated to implement something.
Lisp is basically a DSL factory, and everything is done via DSL. Can Perl7 do that better than Lisp? Is that a good or bad thing?
Well, it doesn't matter. Perl5 is what it is. Perl6 was a social failure. I doubt Perl7 will change anything.
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.
For all his agreeableness, maybe Larry Wall left behind a chaos of unsolved semantics. Perhaps discussions they never really recovered from. I do not know the story, and this is speculative only.
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.
Each line of the Zen of Python is the negation of one of the Perl's architectural principles. And when your entire identity is denying something, you can't be anything but similar to that thing.
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 hon…
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'm curious to know if anyone out there building new systems in Perl or is it all just maintenance mode for Perl based systems?
Perl is very well suited for certain tasks (not large software systems, but programs that process data). It is also one of very few languages/ecosystems where you can expect your code to work after >10 years. This is why I sometimes use it, for example my fs consistency checker ( https://github.com/jwr/ccheck ) was written in Perl specifically because it's a long-term tool and I would like to be able to run it on any…
I disagree. Perl still works fine for large systems. I understand why people choose other languages. It depends on what your needs are and what skillset works best for you and those you work with.