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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#221

Post by doomvox »

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…

> That butterfly was the worst.

Agree completely. Larry Wall is pretty brilliant, but he shouldn't be doing graphics design.

Actually, I tend to dislike cutsey-poo cartoon icons, in general. If you want to pick an animal totem, there are plenty of public domain photos of actual animals courtesy of the NSF and such...

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#222

Post by doomvox »

viraptor wrote: post #31
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…

> because Perl has not introduced breaking changes since 5.000. I was curious and you made me check. There's a number of releases with incompatible changes listed if you google for it. For example a whole list at https://perldoc.perl.org/5.12.0/perldelta#Other-potentially-... So no, there's been quite a few.

> no, there's been quite a few.

Yes, most of them relatively minor though, which is why the OP has never stumbled across one.

(I found one once-- it turned out one coder had invented his own hash slice syntax. It wasn't supposed to work, but it did, until a particular upgrade...).

In general, Perl has been traditionally committed to backwards compatibility, but not fanatically so-- there is a deprecation cycle that can be used to remove the more problematic things.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#223

Post by doomvox »

7r7292DuMfMz1Rh wrote: post #4
lordofgibbons wrote: post #2

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?

Unfortunately, yes, people are still building new systems in Perl. In my experience, it's been because existing infrastructure that new systems need is already written in Perl. I'll note that if you use a strict subset of Perl, and write it well, with lots of unit tests, it's bearable to use. But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async. And if you stray into the "clever" subset of Perl,…

> it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async

Perl has some decent CPAN modules for handling multi-process applications-- it is true that it's very weak for threaded applications.

(Raku on the other hand has some extremly convenient CAP features in general.)

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#224

Post by doomvox »

jzer0cool wrote: post #32

Can anyone advocate here their thoughts to "must use" Perl for any scripts / projects?

Perl has a fast, powerful well-integrated regular expression engine, with full unicode support.

In general, Perl tends to be much faster than the competing scripting languages (which is why you never see people talk about benchmark numbers, they'd give you the wrong answer).

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#225

Post by atweiden »

I’m disappointed in the way this Perl 6 v Perl 7 debate is developing. Perl 6 modernizes Perl with e.g. concurrent and reactive programming, built-in grammars and a reimagined regex syntax superior to legacy PCRE, named function arguments, and gradual typing.

Perl 6 was designed to be the successor language to Perl 5.

The only technical grounds for Perl 6 being metaphorically sidelined was because Perl 6 lacked the startup and runtime performance characteristics of Perl 5 — fixable problems.

Proponents of Perl 5 often contend Perl could’ve escaped developer mindshare loss without Perl 6 in the picture. But to claim Python, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust and JS/TS never would’ve gained serious developer mindshare had _Perl 6_ not existed seems very myopic to me. All the brilliant new languages and web frameworks launching were bound to erode Perl’s early established dominance regardless.

Things would be different now if Perl 6 was at least as performant as Perl 5. Perhaps then it would’ve become popular years ago amongst Perl users to switch all greenfield Perl code to Perl 6. Then “Perl” would’ve become synonymous with modern language features.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#227

Post by cutler »

baq wrote: post #164
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…

you've also described the reason lisp ultimately failed IMHO - it's selling point is creating first-class DSLs, but you can't hire anyone experienced in the DSL you've got...

Nubank is built exclusively in Clojure, proving large-scale projects can be developed with a Lisp. Same goes for Paul Graham and Viaweb.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#228

Post by doomvox »

natmaka wrote: post #26
kamaal wrote: post #20

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…

Indeed, and being able to invoke 'perl -ane ...' is sometimes a bliss.

If you use -E rather than -e you get some new features turned on by default, notably you can use "say" instead of "print".

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#229

Post by doomvox »

rabbits77 wrote: post #188
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 f…

> Perl 7 there was a mutiny by jealous and bitter collaborators

Look, I hate to harsh on Sawyer X-- he's done a bunch of good stuff for perl over the years, and I hope to see him around again-- but his Perl 7 push was just a mess. He was getting frustrated about things, and tried to plan and push through some big changes before anyone could complain, but he wasn't really that clear on what the big changes were supposed to be-- he left a couple of weeks to figure it out after that big announcement, and even the inner cabal he had talked to about this stuff first seemed more than a little surprised.

One of the major things we got out of all this is it made it clear we needed some work on improved processes and transparency and such, and that's actually happened. There's a steering committee that makes a point of publishing its minutes, and an RFC process to talk over proposed changes. Some of these changes are in fact actually happening, and a number of them are discussed in this v5.36 annoucement (e.g. subroutine signatures are no longer experimental).

This actually seems like a really bright crew in charge, and they're making very sane decisions.

There's really no reason to think that there's some great benefit to breakage-on-upgrade: its a solution in search of a problem.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#230

Post by jlg23 »

runevault wrote: post #89
jlg23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control. Plus it makes expanding a dev team significantly harder since you really need people all on the same page of what readability means. Yes you can do things like coding standards, but the more free form the language the tougher such standards are. That doesn't…

Is there any branch of engineering where "a couple days of not worrying" does not have the potential to be "lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control"?
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