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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#31

Post by viraptor »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #14
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?

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.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#33

Post by samwillis »

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?

Not new, but I'm currently working on a freelance project modernising the front end / UI of a bioinformatics platform that's written in Perl. Also I wouldn't say it's in maintenance mode, there are new features being developed for it all the time.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#34

Post by viraptor »

badsectoracula wrote: post #27
viraptor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the buzz about python3 fiasco, we're pretty much migrated now and py2 gets dropped from supported versions and system repositories. Perl devs would be in a better situation with a "fiasco" like that. Ruby went through its own big breaking changes at least 2 times before as well. So... if people have good reasons to stay, a big change won't drive them away.

> For all the buzz about python3 fiasco, we're pretty much migrated now and py2 Python 3.0 was released in 2008, the fact that 14 years later 2.7 is still widely available (and often the default python, e.g. in my openSUSE Tumbleweed system here) means that the "buzz" was more than warranted. Also of course things would migrate, it isn't like there was any choice on that matter (and projects like Tauthon that tried t…

> 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 always named python. It's going away anyway: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP3/in...

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#35

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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.

Yes, and these changes are feature flagged and optional and would not affect existing scripts.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#36

Post by codeflo »

badsectoracula wrote: post #24
codeflo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about applications, not one-off scripts. It should be easy to always stay on the latest language version, with good tooling to migrate your code, and importantly, the ability to do it piece by piece. (Python 3 was all-or-nothing for the entire ecosystem .) Also, many migrations are trivial in practice, like renaming an identifier to avoid the new keyword. What this gives you is high confidence that when inserti…

Yes i know, in fact i thought about it when writing that line but i thought it'd be obvious that the issue still remains, especially if said files are too big. It might be easier but you are not really solving the problem as well as opting in to the new functionality when and if needed.

I hope we can agree that Python 3 was qualitatively different because all of your libraries had to migrate first.

Now, your new argument depends on how hard it is to migrate a single file. If that’s sufficiently easy, you simply do it. Migrating to the last Rust edition, I had to fix maybe a handful of things in an entire crate; most files didn’t have to be touched at all.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#37

Post by forgotmypw17 »

xupybd wrote: post #29
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…

I found Perl suffered from dependency issues as well. Not the language but the modules you tend to want to use. Especially when they're underpinned by c libraries. I'd preference operating system libraries then fall back to Cpan. Over time it got harder to maintain older applications as the libraries dropped out of repositories. Have you found anything similar?

You're right, and this is why I don't use third-party modules. If I need something I can't write myself, I use the shell version instead of a module.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#38

Post by jwr »

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?

Perl is very well suited for certain tasks (not large software systems, but programs that process data). It is also one of very few languages/ecosystems where you can expect your code to work after >10 years. This is why I sometimes use it, for example my fs consistency checker (https://github.com/jwr/ccheck) was written in Perl specifically because it's a long-term tool and I would like to be able to run it on any system in 15 years.

Compare this long-term approach with the fires in Python or (heaven forbid) Node ecosystems, where things break all the time.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#39

Post by baybal2 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #15
codeflo wrote: post #11

I’ve written a nontrivial anount of Perl code in my life, admittedly almost none in the last decade. For all its obvious flaws, I always liked the language, and am happy to see it getting attention and moving forward. Having said that, I think this might be too fine-grained. First, opting in to an experimental feature could be a one-liner, “use experimental feature ‘try’” or similar. There’s no point in punishing you…

> The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features. Probably not much of a problem currently, but might be if releases get more frequent. But to use that new feature they'd need to modify their code anyway, so this isn't really an issue in practice, is it? > I personally like the “edition” concept of Rust a lot be…

> How is this any different from having a repeat of the python2->python3 fiasco

Perl already had python2->python 3000 fiasco before python: PERL6

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#40

Post by codeflo »

viraptor wrote: post #34
badsectoracula wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the buzz about python3 fiasco, we're pretty much migrated now and py2 Python 3.0 was released in 2008, the fact that 14 years later 2.7 is still widely available (and often the default python, e.g. in my openSUSE Tumbleweed system here) means that the "buzz" was more than warranted. Also of course things would migrate, it isn't like there was any choice on that matter (and projects like Tauthon that tried t…

> 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 Python and found a significantly lacking and confusing ecosystem.
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