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Why Perl Didn't Win

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Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#141

Post by raiph »

duskwuff wrote: post #134
ugexe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectively: https://github.com/rakudo-p5/v5 While not quite the same as what was asked, it's clear that 'not at all' is not an informed answer

That module's neat, but CPAN is still out of reach. For one, a lot of important modules in CPAN contain XS components, which don't carry over. Additionally, a lot of the modules that don't use XS are likely to be using unusual features of Perl5 which aren't fully emulated by that shim.

Yes. v5, a Perl 5 compiler written in Perl 6, is promising tech with potentially huge long term (10 years) strategic consequences for Perl 5 and Perl. But it's very early days and it correctly handles only the simplest of modules. I'd hazard a guess that currently less than 1% of CPAN modules pass their tests when loaded by v5.

But Inline::Perl5 is a completely different animal. It handles modules using XS or whatever fine. See my nearby comments for further details.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#142

Post by sukilot »

gaius wrote: post #53
beat wrote: post #20

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…

Indeed. While personally I think Tcl is a better language than either, professionally I jumped straight from Perl 4 to Python, bypassing Perl 5 altogether. The combination of needing rigid standards to make a codebase maintainable in big projects, with the dynamic nature of the language meaning that tool support for it was scarce, was a double whammy. Now that I think about it, not even that big projects, teams of 10…

This sounds less like "perl 5" was a downgrade, and more like, "switching from sysadmin scripts to building enterprise projects (in ~2001-~2008 Amazon.com was written in Perl) made Perl less fun".

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#143

Post by sukilot »

silvestrov wrote: post #47
riffraff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. I don't think that's the case. The problem is that the generation of tools that have stuff in common with perl (awk, sed, shell) are completely unfamiliar to programmers which started programming in the last 15 years, compared to those that started 30 years ago.

Look at how much boilerplate code you need in Perl 5 to create a class versus C++/Java's simple class MyClass { } You need to assign to a variable named @ISA, you need to return 1; at the bottom of the file. And 'public' members have to be listed in the EXPORT variable. It is really funny that Perl 5 OO need more boilerplate code than Java!

"public static void" is more boilerplate per method than Perl has per module.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#144

Post by raiph »

chrisdone wrote: post #77
perlgeek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Perl 6? Fourteen years and nothing to show for it ... except a nearly feature-complete [1] compiler [2] and an impressive test suite [3] [1] http://perl6.org/compilers/features [2] http://rakudo.org/ [3] https://github.com/perl6/roast/ > and it'll have to be backwards compatible to all the things violently wrong with Perl 5 Not at all. The whole point about Perl 6 is that it breaks backwards compatibility to fi…

> The whole point about Perl 6 is that it breaks backwards compatibility I think this is is a contributor to why Perl 6 will never amount to anything. That boat has sailed. Python 3 broke backwards compatibility and to my knowledge everybody is still using Python 2. Python has a lot of energy right now, so that might save it, or it might go the way of Perl when the next cool language comes out and everybody jumps shi…

One way to look at things is that Perl 6 breaks backwards compatibility with Perl 5. Another is that Perl 6 has well designed language interop and evolution features that make it so easy to nicely use code and libs from other languages that backwards compatibility becomes irrelevant.

The big problem with Perl 6 has been that the implementation has trailed the ambitions of the design. But that's changing due to pieces like Inline::Perl5 falling in to place. (See my comments nearby for more details.)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#146

Post by pwr22 »

cturner wrote: post #62
ugexe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are commits to Rakudo, a Perl 6 compiler, every day. It's also scheduled to be production ready by the end of 2015.

You might be right. But I have been reading forum posts to this effect for fifteen years, and eventually eveyone switches off. Even if you are right, would you trust your career focus to a software community who had got it this wrong for that long? I am looking forward to checking out a future perl 6 but part of that is now duke nukem forever curiosity - what on earth could be in it that kept those smart people at it…

Hmmm, they've never committed to a deadline or even tried to aim for a production release before this time, so it may turn out better than you'd expect

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#147

Post by pwr22 »

p0nce wrote: post #85

When I was younger I pushed myself to know Perl 5. I tried to learn Perl with one book. It was surprinsingly hard. I took a simpler book. I also failed grasping Perl. Those were the two recommended books for learning. I've come to realize years after that Perl is simply difficult to learn, lots of little things to memorize. Its community took pride in language arcana. Things that are now simple in other languages are…

Learning Perl is excellent for a beginner

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#148

Post by chromatic »

pwr22 wrote: post #146
cturner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right. But I have been reading forum posts to this effect for fifteen years, and eventually eveyone switches off. Even if you are right, would you trust your career focus to a software community who had got it this wrong for that long? I am looking forward to checking out a future perl 6 but part of that is now duke nukem forever curiosity - what on earth could be in it that kept those smart people at it…

Hmmm, they've never committed to a deadline or even tried to aim for a production release before this time, so it may turn out better than you'd expect

they've never committed to a deadline

Baloney.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#149

Post by pwr22 »

p0nce wrote: post #85

When I was younger I pushed myself to know Perl 5. I tried to learn Perl with one book. It was surprinsingly hard. I took a simpler book. I also failed grasping Perl. Those were the two recommended books for learning. I've come to realize years after that Perl is simply difficult to learn, lots of little things to memorize. Its community took pride in language arcana. Things that are now simple in other languages are…

https://gist.github.com/pwr22/c63c0e3f3309d0c95344

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#150

Post by Mithaldu »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #113
Mithaldu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're incorrect in your realization. The truth is that the older books for learning perl are simply shitty. If you read Ovid's Beginning Perl, or chromatic's Modern Perl, you'll find they managed to explain the concepts very easily.

No, he's right. Perl is shitty. Have you ever read a random Perl script? It's impossible to interpret.

"No, he's right. Japanese is shitty. Have you ever read a random Japanese scroll? It's impossible to interpret. Even in romaji!"
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