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Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

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251–260 of 573 posts

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#251

I was part of a team that wrote significant parts of Amazon's payment processing systems in Perl in the late 90s. I really loved the language. It's object system was so flexible and powerful. Once you understood how write idiomatic perl. It was a joy to use. I'm looking forward to trying out Perl 7.

I hear Perl has weak typing with implicit type conversion. The only other language I know that has a powerful implicit type conversion system is C++. How does implicit type conversion work in Perl?

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#252
post #46

Need a comprehensive, up-to-date, yet brief, status of what happened to Perl 6 and where it stands in today's s/w tech.

Perl 6 had its first release in December 2015. Since then, it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). It has monthly releases and a weekly blog: https://rakudoweekly.blog

It supports an improved regex syntax, grammars, Unicode NFG (Normalization Form Grapheme, think "\r\n" as a single codepoint), a gradual type system, async execution of code, junctions, event driven execution, set operations...

Hope this was short enough.

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#253
post #5

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I do. Efficient, cheap and stable. Ported to about everywhere.

What do you mean by efficient and cheap? It doesn't fare well in https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... at least.

Depends on what you mean by "fare well". Even in those benchmarks, Perl seems to have a lower memory footprint than Node.js in most of the results.

It's also worth noting that three of the examples (pidigits, reverse-complement, fasta) don't seem to do any multiprocessing in Perl whereas they do in Node.js. At least for reverse-complement and fasta, it should be possible to rewrite those to use multithreading (like the Node.js versions do).

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#254
post #105
post #68

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That doesn't add up because today's most popular languages - JS, Java, Python, PHP and Ruby - were also released in the 90s.

PHP was a reimplementation of Perl by someone who didn't understand why Perl did things the way they did and so ended up creating a vastly inferior language. Other than maintaining some legacy projects, I've not touched PHP in over a decade and I'm glad to avoid it. Perl is a tool I still return to for some tasks (one was a bizarre management request for a spreadsheet of all the Java classes in a large project which…

Yes and No. PHP (Perl for Home Pages) main starting point for popularity was that it was easy to make into an Apache module that could be used on shared hosting. Perl's Apache module was a single interpreter for the whole server. Great for business sites and such, not good when you have multiple unrelated users using the same server. PHP was just something that you could turn on and uses on your shared hosting.

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#256

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As far as i know Java and PHP became popular later in the 90s / early 2000s. Javascript was browser only until 2010, Ruby only became popular after Rails came out mid-2000s. There is a decade gap there.

> Javascript was browser only until 2010 Depending on how you look at it you are at least a decade too late: we Java folks had the Rhino Javascript engine back in the late 1990ies, and it had an interpreted mode since 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) I think it is even mentioned in the Javascript in a Nutshell book by David Flanagan (I haven't read it since then but I studied that book as…

True, I played with Rhino, Jack / JSGI early on, and did a couple projects with Aptana Jaxer around 2009. It was not really an option most developers would even consider, though.

Node came out in 2009, and writing server-side JS was still a fringe practice for a couple more years, so 2010 is me being generous to avoid comments on the exact timeline ;) It really picked up mainstream adoption around 2011-2012.

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#257

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Sure, it's got lots of historical baggage, but there are more sensible alternatives to $| - like STDOUT->autoflush(1) - it's not like you have to use the obscure versions of every feature.

That certainly doesn't solve the problem of other people showboating their knowledge of obscure Perl sigils by using those ridiculous line-noise abbreviations in code you're trying to use and understand, so you have to look up each bit of obscure punctuation in its particular context in order to understand the code. If hard-to-read-and-remember syntax exists, people WILL use it. And some people will make a POINT to u…

Whatever happened to the neophyte raising him/herself up to level of the master? Programming seems to be the only profession in which the beginner is excused learning the language thoroughly and, worse, that he/she expects the language to be dumbed down to make it easier to learn. Can you imagine a budding musician complaining that musical notation should be made "easier for beginners"? If you want to grok Perl learn Perl ... thoroughly.

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#258
post #110

What project, if you were starting now from the scratch, would you use Perl for?

Any project that runs on a computer (not a microcontroller) that doesn't need a hardware accelerated multimedia. But even if the later you can always use sdl2.

My last three perl projects (not counting throwaway minor scripts): The control interface of a galvanic vestibular stimulator for VR motion sickness. A GUI for doing the required quirky edits to text files for text to speech smoothness. A comment system for a static website.

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#259

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I think you should revisit perl. My first job writing perl was in 2005 or 2006, and it was not a good language for an eager idiot without guidance. After a couple years, I started getting it, and it became one of my favorite languages. I think it was my coworker who told me to read https://hop.perl.plover.com/ and it blew my mind and made me start to rethink how I was approaching code. With the languages that I'd bee…

Do you have a good link to learn about grammars in perl?

Perl does not have grammars (at least, not built-in). Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) does: https://docs.raku.org/language/grammar_tutorial

Re: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

#260
post #58

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You don't hear about it, but Perl has had many millions thrown at it too.

JS is probably closer to billions.

Not just orders of magnitude more money, but more importantly the large number of incredibly talented people working full time on JavaScript, in many different companies and research institutions, collaborating together. JavaScript benefits from an overwhelming network effect and critical mass of tools and developers, that Perl just can't touch, and never will.
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