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Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

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

#41

Post by 1-more »

smaili wrote: post #20
banana_giraffe wrote: post #2

They last line of the article summarizes it well: > Perl 7 is v5.32 with different settings. Your code should work if it’s not a mess. Expect a user release within a year. Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl? The only times I see it is for legacy stuff, and then only because the script is too much of a hassle to be rewritten.

IIRC Craigslist was written in Perl but that's the only high traffic site that comes to mind.

I know some fantasy sports site was, maybe CBS? I had a UX designer colleague who had worked on that.

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

#42

Post by psadri »

benbristow wrote: post #27
banana_giraffe wrote: post #2

They last line of the article summarizes it well: > Perl 7 is v5.32 with different settings. Your code should work if it’s not a mess. Expect a user release within a year. Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl? The only times I see it is for legacy stuff, and then only because the script is too much of a hassle to be rewritten.

I used to work for a company that used Perl as their primary language. The codebase was millions of lines long, modules (pm files) with like 1000 methods and 10,000 lines, a total mess and it had 0 unit tests too. Almost beyond salvageable. Left a bit of a sour taste. They're trying to migrate to AWS but AWS don't even natively support Perl in their libraries. There's a few third party libraries in CPAN but nothing a…

Perl used to have one of the most extensive module libraries. One of the things I miss about Perl was it’s more sensible module namespace convention (Eg Net::... for networking related) vs the more hip but confusing and hard to discover naming of node modules.

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

#44

Post by ricardobeat »

kbenson wrote: post #28
continuational wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nodejs is very fast, because it uses an an engine that has had multiple millions of dollars thrown at it to make it fast. Most interpreted languages don't fare well against it. Perl fares somewhat favorably against Python, Ruby and PHP though. Those are what I would consider equivalent languages to compare against to get a general idea of its speed.

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

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

#45

Post by nchelluri »

w0m wrote: post #38
ugexe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your opinion on Perl is based on one code base you worked at on one job?

Honestly that's more than most I think. I've written tens of thousands of lines of perl professionally and I generally share the same opinion.

I've been writing (Modern) Perl for about 3.5 years and I disagree that Perl necessarily tends to unreadable code. I really don't think that's true at all.

To quote myself from a recent discussion:

I think some languages do make it easy to write convoluted code, but through judicious use of coding standards (including a helping of common sense [don't be clever where you can at all avoid it, which IME is ~~almost~~ all the time], code linters, and so on) I think how you use a language plays a huge part in code maintainability.

For instance, I've heard PHP get shit on pretty badly all around the web, but I've worked at PHP shops that had nice, clean codebases, and my current Perl codebase is, in many ways, nicely structured. That's not to say there aren't some hairy codepaths that could use refactoring, but I really think that kind of thing, again, can happen in almost any language.

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

#47

Post by IvyMike »

bhaavan wrote: post #15

This feels like a last ditch attempt to save a dying language. ( https://i.imgflip.com/4676mf.jpg ) I wonder what exactly does Perl bring to the table as a language, why would one consider choosing it over other languages.

Regular expressions as a first class language feature.

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

#48

Post by jes5199 »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #24

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.

huh. I spent a couple years writing perl professionally, I guess that was around 2006, and I couldn't agree less. Its object system is so bizarre compared to any other language - it's like it doesn't really have an object system, it has parts of a system that you can try to assemble, but no matter what you do you end up with something weird.

And on top of that, the sigils, refs, and `wantarray` systems means that figuring out what syntax you need to invoke something correctly is confusing mental overhead that you have to keep in mind for every function call

Basically the things I learned in perl were the least transferrable concepts of any programming language I've ever worked with. You learn Haskell, or Forth, or Lisp and you learn insights and patterns that you can use in any language. You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall.

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

#49

Post by ricardobeat »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #24

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.

This seems to be a common experience - people say it felt powerful and modern in the 90s, because it was. For those who started programming in the 00s and 10s it looks clunky and weird compared to the other options.

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

#50

Post by Diederich »

jpxw wrote: post #3
banana_giraffe wrote: post #2

They last line of the article summarizes it well: > Perl 7 is v5.32 with different settings. Your code should work if it’s not a mess. Expect a user release within a year. Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl? The only times I see it is for legacy stuff, and then only because the script is too much of a hassle to be rewritten.

Yep, I know of one company still actively using Perl for a large part of its infrastructure. It has its use cases.

One that is definitely still using Perl in a very big way is https://www.ariba.com/

Ariba isn't a household name, but it has deep and widespread connections to thousands of the largest companies in the world.

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