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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#181

Post by chrisseaton »

polynomial wrote: post #179
chrisseaton wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Perl fell victim to a huge change of fashion around the 2000s. 'There's more than one way to do it' and the whimsical, deliberately slightly obtuse design of Perl used to be what people valued. Then something happened (perhaps it was how people started building much larger apps in 'scripting' languages, to use an out-dated term) and I think to most people under 35 deliberately having 'more than one way to do…

And then there was the rise of Javascript, which also allows for many many ways of doing the same thing.

Hmmm I'm not sure I think so? JavaScript is a pretty simple and compact language. Referencing object fields yes... but that's because of a uniform model of arrays and objects afforded different syntaxes. That's not really what I mean.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#182

Post by goto11 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #173
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…

I think Perl fell victim to a huge change of fashion around the 2000s. 'There's more than one way to do it' and the whimsical, deliberately slightly obtuse design of Perl used to be what people valued. Then something happened (perhaps it was how people started building much larger apps in 'scripting' languages, to use an out-dated term) and I think to most people under 35 deliberately having 'more than one way to do…

Perl is a great language if you are a single developer. I think there is some "reverse network effect" for Perl, where people might enjoy writing in the language but nobody enjoys having to maintain Perl written by someone else. So basically you don't encourage others to use it.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#183

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

mikem170 wrote: post #154
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. (edit) > The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance…

> If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise. I tend to think that things like high level documentation, organizing libraries and functions into good abstractions, comments, and naming make a bigger difference than the programming language chosen, within reason. The goal can be to make things as easy as possible for all developers as opposed to using every fea…

Thank you

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#184

Post by MadWombat »

codeflo wrote: post #40
viraptor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it isn't like there was any choice on that matter There was another choice. This is what I mean: however bad you think py2->py3 was, people are using py3 now unless they've got really good reasons not to and are prepared to suffer. When it came to perl5/6, it turns out over time most people choose "neither". SUSE didn't update the link like others did so it's not really that py2 is the default, but python2 was alwa…

The “neither” choice happened with Python 2/3 as well. The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend. Long before that, before the Python 3 transition, there was a significant amount of buzz around everything from web frameworks to desktop GUI applications. The way I remember it, almost all of that attention was killed during the transition, when people tried…

"The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend"

This new trend is about a decade old by now. Pandas was released in 2011, numpy in 1995. Google released Tensorflow to the public in 2015.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#186

Post by petre »

dinom wrote: post #155
petre wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the steering council simply wants to to avoid being bitten by Zawinski's "CADT" model 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; At the top of your program.

I hesitate to say "they're bikeshedding" since triviality can be highly subjective. For me, backward compatibility and a smooth, discretionary upgrade path is greatly preferred to trends in language popularity. Therefore, I appreciate the extra deliberation they seem to be taking. Of course other people have different preferences. To suggest they're bikeshedding implies there's some bigger problems being ignored. Can…

> Can you elaborate on what those may be?

Read rurban's comment below.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#187

Post by heresie-dabord »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #175
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)…

A couple of the things that perl has over python and ruby... #1 is execution overhead, although that may have changed in recent times. #2 is that it's preinstalled on most linux/BSD OS's as a requirement for its plumbing, which makes it nice if you're trying to run a system on minimal dependencies. It's ugly for all the reasons that people complain about it for but those are largely complaints and the rest of us have…

Perl is excellent for data analysis in a terminal.

It is built to work with pipes, it's fast, concise, stable, and easy to extend. The REGEX integration is superb.

It seems to me that we have a couple of generations of programmers who turn up their nose at anything that isn't Python notation and then repeat vague arguments about Python's superiority. But like all dogmatic systems, there is no agreement among the zealots.

Python is far from perfect; I see many problems in the Python ecosystem. There remains much to be said for concision and expressivity in other languages. In any case, by the time one has written enough Python, one sees that the "purity of notation" is a myth. And the DSLs within Python (Pandas, Numpy) offer their own pain.

awk, sed, grep, C, C++, Java, and Perl are excellent tools.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#188

Post by rabbits77 »

mberning wrote: post #110

A benevolent dictator for life is clearly a very beneficial thing for open source projects.

Yes! The committee approach does not seem to work well. The “benevolent dictator” is really often just a solid CEO type: sets the vision, acts as head salesperson, and has the final word on all important decisions.

What happened with Perl is that, effectively, the “pumpking” held that power but when Sawyer X actually used his discretion to announce Perl 7 there was a mutiny by jealous and bitter collaborators. They felt they should have some say in the matter and formed this Perl Steering Committee. As the brilliant Reini Urban has pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this group are fairly mediocre talent wise and mostly just spend their time sniping at each other.

Reini’s cperl or Will Braswell’s rperl are both worthy projects that in a more perfect universe would have long ago supplanted the now rudderless mainline perl interpreter.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#189

Post by flomo »

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…

Yeah, A lot of those early web apps were total spaghetti garbage hardcoded to a table layout, so if they survived most of them were rewritten from scratch. Of course perl programmers' tricky tendencies didn't help, but also say ASP and ColdFusion etc have similar reputation issues.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#190

Post by sigzero »

jandrese wrote: post #169

This seems like a whole lot of bending over backwards to avoid breaking a handful of edge cases that could be cleaned up on their own without too much drama. I would kind of prefer the features be enabled by default if you use a high enough version and if a module breaks you just fix it or dial back the version number at the top of your script until it is fixed. But I'd also run all of the test suites on CPAN against…

The majority didn't want the breaking possibility so it won out. It was discussed at length.
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