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Dwindling CPAN Releases

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61–70 of 180 posts

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#61
Perl is the language I once understood when I used it everyday but now look at with utter confusion. It's definitely not a casual language.

As a comparison, I peeked at some Delphi/pascal code I'd written and a book a few weeks back and it was still parseable by my brain years later.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#62
post #54
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl Nukem Forever?

Wait, what? Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. The ecosystem for the language is also evolving at a good pace.

>Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable.

So is Duke Nukem Forever.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#63
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used python for a bit but switched to Perl because it 1) Works 2) Is ubiquitous 3) Is stable 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc)

> 2) Is ubiquitous On which systems do you have Perl readily available but not Python?

Which one? Python 3.5.x or 3.7.x or something else? Version 3 should be version 3. Anything written in 3 ought to work on every Python 3. Not so in the Python world. And that makes it a mess to use (unless you Dockerize every script).

Perl 5 is Perl 5 everywhere.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#64
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Works Almost anything can "work" > 2) Is ubiquitous So is awk, don't write software in it. > 3) Is stable This will become questionable as Perl slips into non-maintained mode. > 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc) Perl syntax is very far from "normal"

Perl is a general purpose programming language. The Perl interpreter and language are stable, it's not going anywhere soon. Perl and its syntax have been around a lot longer than most other languages and is very similar to C, C++, JavaScript and PHP. What do you consider normal syntax?

The most obnoxious parameter passing in existence? The magic variables everywhere? Perl code is an unreadable heap of spaghetti, I’d much rather be figuring out unallocated memory bugs in C then read Perl.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. The ecosystem for the language is also evolving at a good pace.

>Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. So is Duke Nukem Forever.

we waited for them since the very beginning of the millenium, i played with both and here is the difference: DNF is very desapointed and is not the revolution i expected. Perl6 is a game changer and push the idea of "scripting" way beyond i was imagining it (and i played with a lot of langages)

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. So is Duke Nukem Forever.

we waited for them since the very beginning of the millenium, i played with both and here is the difference: DNF is very desapointed and is not the revolution i expected. Perl6 is a game changer and push the idea of "scripting" way beyond i was imagining it (and i played with a lot of langages)

Perl 6 is more than a scripting language. It clearly has elements of a very general high level language that can scale to large program sizes.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a experienced linux sysadmin point of view perl5 is as good as it gets. I've been searching for alternatives for about 10 years now, at first because my novice self was heaving headaches reading other people code and even my own. I hated perl but I hated everything else even more as I came to know them. No autovivification? Some assignments copy the data and some create references and you need to memorize the co…

Out of interest, what do you feel is holding back Perl 6 from being a replacement for Perl 5 in your usecases?

Performance. 5 times slower than Ruby when parsing a log file with a simple regex is a non-starter.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#68
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ironic, because even the most ardent Perlies among us were wringing our hands about its inevitable decline well before then.

The rate of increase must have been declining (i.e. rate of rate of increase negative) in order for it to have peaked. This was probably detectable.

If one is paying attention, one can spot early signs of decline in lots of things that seem very strong.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#69
post #2

Looks like peak Perl was about 2012-2014. :(

Which is ironic, because even the most ardent Perlies among us were wringing our hands about its inevitable decline well before then.

Choose a different metric, and the story will change significantly:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl%20t...

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl

There are also anecdotes such as this:

https://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=1225020

Perl6 was supposed to help with this. It has yet to do so.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#70
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl more than any other language I know depends on the self-restraint of the programmer to write readable code and not be overly clever with their syntax. I’ve worked on some large Perl codebases in the past that were as readable and maintainable as, say, Python.

That is not normal.

All the "big" Perl codebases I've worked with were as readable as I'd have expected any "big" codebase to be, if not better. What was your experience like?
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