Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

perl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 573 posts

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

#61

Post by petethered »

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.

Duck Duck Go and Booking.com were/are Perl backends.

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

#62

Post by empath75 »

IvyMike wrote: post #47
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.

You should see some of the atrocities I had to debug at aol because of regex abuse.

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

#63

Post by ainar-g »

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.

OpenBSD uses Perl actively.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159041121804486&w=2

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

#64

Post by foobar_ »

This is just bad maintenance. Just pick all the stuff people are complaining about and fix it!

1. Improve threads

2. Improve C API support

3. Give local::lib, cpanm by default ... multiple perl versions by default

4. Give direct support for coroutines / async await

5. Mark experimental features as non-experimental (attributes, signatures)

6. Pick an OO system, package system

7. Make switch cool again

8. Get more core modules or remove some. Give more visibility to cool perl modules. like PDL or something.

9. Improve GUI toolkit, Web Deployment and Web Assembly support

10. Improve look and feel of community sites

Heck break some backwards compatibility with Perl4, get rid of format.

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

#65

Post by JJMcJ »

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…

Last Perl shop I worked at was newer than the company you described but well on its way toward being like this.

Since Perl code is often very compact, it probably needs a higher comment to code ratio than most other languages, but you don't see that either.

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

#66

Post by Floegipoky »

fizixer wrote: 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 is basically a totally different language than any other Perl, and it took a very long time to go from announcement (2000) to release (2015). It was renamed to Raku last year.

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

#67

Post by benbristow »

jschwartzi wrote: post #59
w0m wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I've got a Perl codebase that's conservatively tens of thousands of lines, and it's honestly a struggle to write anything in it that isn't a big ball of mud. There's about 50 different ways to do anything in the language, the syntax is infuriatingly obtuse, and you can't rely on any documentation because it will recommend doing things that experts don't recommend doing. The system is from like 2013 and still go…

Perl's syntax is really confusing.

Especially for example how variables have symbols for different types ($ for scalars, % for hashes, @ for arrays). And if you want to for example pass an array to a function you have to send it manually referenced with like method(\@myArray) which then inside the method is contained in a $scalar.

Compared to Python for example where you'd literally just pass the array to the method like method(array).

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

#68

Post by cutler »

ricardobeat wrote: post #49
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.

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

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

#70

Post by hnlmorg »

1-more wrote: post #41
smaili wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A surprisingly large number of fantasy sports sites are.

Perl is everywhere, it's just not widely publicised because of the stigma attached to the language.

Post reply on HN