Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 245 posts

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#201

Post by bmn__ »

mdaniel wrote: post #148
jart wrote: post #105

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…

Since "backronyms" are a thing, I think they should adopt the camel as the logo, given that's what I see in my head when I think of perl: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/cover/0596000278/250w/

Not as simple as you think: http://neilb.org/2020/12/04/perl-and-camels.html

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#202

Post by anthk »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #145
jlg23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you use or abuse that freedom is entirely your choice.

The languages that truly let you do anything you want flexibly invariably lead to incomprehensible ivory towers. It is why managers hate Lisp, it's why Perl is joked as write-once read-never. 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…

Scheme is easy. Common Lisp it's a total distinct monster.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#203

Post by anthk »

jwr wrote: post #60
hollander wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it's a long-term tool and I would like to be able to run it on any system in 15 years What about Docker and Virtualenv? Both make it possible to keep running code until the end of times.

I do use Docker for freezing dumpster fires like CSS toolkits that need to be built using node. And that works well to a certain extent, but there is still the complexity of Docker, having to set it up when you want to use the tool, having to deal with changes happening in it over the years, setting up filesystem sharing, etc. Whereas with Perl it's easy: any UNIX system (and I do mean UNIX in a wide sense, as I've r…

Also, cpan (better cpanminus) will work well enough.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#204

Post by kstrauser »

Beltalowda wrote: post #200
gwd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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..…

> With Python 2 -> 3, my understanding was that everything had to be updated recursively. You can mix "Python 2" and "Python 3" code, but the problem is (was) that the semantics in Python 3 surrounding string handling changed so much that in reality this was tricky to accomplish, and Python's dynamic untyped nature didn't help either. But it was definitely possible to write libraries that worked with Python 2 and 3;…

Python is dynamically and strongly typed. It's definitely not untyped.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#205

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #204
Beltalowda wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Python 2 -> 3, my understanding was that everything had to be updated recursively. You can mix "Python 2" and "Python 3" code, but the problem is (was) that the semantics in Python 3 surrounding string handling changed so much that in reality this was tricky to accomplish, and Python's dynamic untyped nature didn't help either. But it was definitely possible to write libraries that worked with Python 2 and 3;…

Python is dynamically and strongly typed. It's definitely not untyped.

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#207

Post by sigzero »

justinator wrote: post #140
dale_glass wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Um, they are going to call it Perl 7 at some future time. There are things they want in place first. But it is happening and it will be P7.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#208

Post by autoexec »

goto11 wrote: post #182
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…

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.

> 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.

I think you might be right. Perl is a lot of fun to write, and it's still my language of choice for log parsing and automating sys admin stuff, but while it's possible to write Perl in a way that's easy for others to maintain and understand most people don't (less fun?) and for small projects it's even sometimes faster to rewrite something than mess with what someone else left you.

Actually... now that I think about it, is it ever a joy to work with someone else's mess in any language?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#209

Post by HeckFeck »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #74
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)…

XLSX or XLS?

Hah, the former. My work isn't that arcane; I've a habit of saying XLS when I mean all things Excel. But there are compatible CPAN modules for either format!

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#210

Post by smcl »

warpech wrote: post #95
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

Fun list! GNOME jump from 3.x to 40 could be added: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/gnome-40-version-number-... Or Microsoft Edge from from 44 to 79: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge

Ohhhh nice idea, there's a couple mentioned here. Maybe I'll make a follow up :D
Post reply on HN