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Why Perl Didn't Win

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Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#31

Post by McGlockenshire »

kijin wrote: post #23

I don't think Perl will ever recover from the Perl 6 fiasco, and I'm worried for Python for the same reason. PHP, on the other hand, handled the PHP 6 "failure" relatively gracefully. There was a bit of stagnation in the days of PHP 5.2 when the devs devoted too much energy to PHP 6 and not enough on improving the current version. But soon, PHP 6 was put on hold and some of its better parts began to be ported to PHP…

> Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0

This is no longer strictly true. On Friday, the "let's remove all the deprecated stuff" RFC was passed. Anything that causes an E_DEPRECATED in 5.6 will now be a fatal in 7. For example, ext/ereg and ext/mysql are no longer included, and have been shipped off to PECL. Shouldn't be a problem for anyone that doesn't compile their own, really. A few php.ini settings are also now removed, which will fatal on startup.

It'll be safe to say that if your code runs fine under 5.6 with error_reporting set to -1, then you'll probably run under 7 without too much trouble.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#32

Post by EdSharkey »

I think it is cool to think of one's self as the hero in the story of their life. You battle adversaries, have little victories, complete long story arcs, find a sweetheart and have romance.

I feel Perl does not deserve to be mentioned in a hero's tale. There's been too much rankling and nincompoopery out of perl's characters given the size of that community. Far, FAR too much griping. Perl is a bummer, and that is why it did not win.

My philosophy is: live the life of a champion - overcome and be a shining light for others. Your war stories should be mostly glorious victories, no matter how mundane the battles or battlefields were.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#33

Post by aytekin »

beat wrote: post #20

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…

Big rewrites = death

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#34

Post by etep »

Version number is micro, this is a macro question, to wit, the following:

When I converted a perl script to python and saved 50% LOC I didn't know which version of which I was using. Am only vaguely aware of the Python 2.x vs. 3 issues. Never was aware of Perl 5 vs. 6.

When Python and Ruby fade, I look forward to the hand wringing about how version whatever didn't get pushed out fast enough. But that won't be the reason.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#35

Post by Blackthorn »

lacker wrote: post #29

If there was no Ruby, I suspect Perl would still be popular. At one point the scripting language holy wars were "Perl vs Python". That turned into "Ruby vs Python". Similar philosophy, lots of better stuff in Ruby.

Perl was dead long before Ruby on Rails was a big thing (Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails).

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#36

Post by frik »

aytekin wrote: post #33
beat wrote: post #20

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…

Big rewrites = death

It seems so.

* Perl 6: almost everyone is on Perl 5, or switched to another language

* Python 3: many libraries and devs will stick with Python 2, several devs switched to Go

* PHP 6: unicode rewrite never released, new features backported to 5.3+, several books were published in advance with PHP 6 in the title, next release will be named PHP 7 to avoid confusion

* Lua 5.2+: half of the community stuck with 5.1 as supported with LuaJIT and is many applications (World of Warcraft, Photoshop Lightroom, Facebooks AI platform, etc.)

* VB.Net: many stick with VB 6, many switched to web development

* VBA.Net: everyone still use VBA 6/7 in various Office applications

* ASP.Net: many stuck with ASP coded in VBS/JS, many switched to similar platforms e.g. PHP

The opposite:

* Node.js: it seems many consider the io.js fork based on up-to-date v8 js engine with ES6 support (nodejs 0.11/12 branch fork) and may leave the old nodejs 0.10.x behind

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#37

Post by Retra »

BuckRogers wrote: post #24
bane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? I dunno. I'm new to Python (version 2 so far) and I easily spend 25-50% of my coding time fighting with ascii/unicode issues in Python. I wish Python 2.x just did something smarter. Similar, but not quite as bad, is the need for me to put str() around non-string values in concatenation. Just f'ing doing it for me. I'll write a bunch of code, put together a message in…

The problem is that both support unicode and 2 vs 3 unicode handling are just two different ways to do it. Which places Python3 firmly in the 'technological churn' category, rather than true technical innovation. I'd probably agree 3.x is more Pythonic in this regard, but I think it was an ill-advised move. Plenty of reasoning in my last response as to why. Why not go ahead and use Python3, you may find it works for…

Are you using Python 2.X because you are maintaining existing code, or because Python 3 is just plain unsuitable for what you're trying to do?

I hear a lot of complaints about Python 3, but in my (limited) experience, 3 is better than 2.X in practically every situation I've experienced. But I've never had to maintain anybody's old code in it, either.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#38

Post by duskwuff »

pyre wrote: post #6
BuckRogers wrote: post #3

I'd disagree with the assessment of Python3 somehow being sunset in 2020. This 2020 End of Life stuff is a marketing tactic to sell it. There are companies with 500K line codebases of Python that won't be on Python3 in 2020, if ever. It's just not feasible when new features have to be shipped. Expect pain (not for the companies in question, for Python3), in the form of a fork. The book isn't closed on this one yet. I…

While you may end up being right, Perl6 is a much larger departure from Perl5 (than Python3 is from Python2). Can one even use CPAN with Perl6? Is it even possible to convert existing Perl5 CPAN packages to support both versions at the same time (like all of the PyPI packages that support both Python2 and Python3)?

> Can one even use CPAN with Perl6? Is it even possible to convert existing Perl5 CPAN packages to support both versions at the same time (like all of the PyPI packages that support both Python2 and Python3)?

Respectively: Not at all, and not without major contortions. The languages have diverged a lot; even basic tasks like defining a function are not the same.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#39

Post by CodeWriter23 »

pjungwir wrote: post #25

I'm curious if anyone really expected Perl 6 to arrive like the article describes ("The problem wasn't apparent in 2000."). I was just a junior programmer, and I loved 5.6, but from the beginning 6 sounded to me like it would be a wholly different language, probably never delivered, and certainly never adopted. Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt that was a broad sentiment back then. By 2001 I was writing Python half ti…

I started calling it out as vaporware around the Holidays 2001. I would be shouted down by certain zealots who would tell me code (pre-Alpha quality) was available for use right now.

At least there are people maintaining Perl 5 at this point.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#40

Post by riffraff »

silvestrov wrote: post #22
beat wrote: post #20

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…

The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. (Java was helped a lot by looking like C). PHP was much more friendly towards new programmers than Perl 5, it was so much easier to make simple web pages. So it took over. It didn't matter that Perl 5 was more advanced. (oh, you uploaded module to same dir and didn't remember to add something to @INC)

> The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity.

I don't think that's the case. The problem is that the generation of tools that have stuff in common with perl (awk, sed, shell) are completely unfamiliar to programmers which started programming in the last 15 years, compared to those that started 30 years ago.

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