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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#61

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

HeckFeck wrote: post #59

I'll speak up for Perl. I learntbit voluntarily in my own spare time and actually get a lot of delight out of the language. I like that it is very unrestrictive. The sigils make sense when you wrap your mind around them and you miss them in other languages. It is excellent at parsing text. I wrote a static site builder using Perl along with a very rudimentary templating system ( https://soft.thran.uk for the curious)…

> it is very unrestrictive

That makes collaboration hard. The freedom I have in putting my thoughts into code, uninhibited by syntax, types and conventions makes it nearly impossible for others to understand and modify my work.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#62

Post by 7r7292DuMfMz1Rh »

petre wrote: post #48
7r7292DuMfMz1Rh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, yes, people are still building new systems in Perl. In my experience, it's been because existing infrastructure that new systems need is already written in Perl. I'll note that if you use a strict subset of Perl, and write it well, with lots of unit tests, it's bearable to use. But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async. And if you stray into the "clever" subset of Perl,…

> But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async Nonsense, there's AnyEvent, EV, IO::Async, Mojo::IOLoop. If you need parallelism, yes, you'd better use Go or something else. And the 10 years old bugs are to a large extent an exageration, because those modules are probably abandoned and you shouldn't use them anyway.

> Nonsense, there's AnyEvent, EV, IO::Async, Mojo::IOLoop

My experience with all of these has been that they've been frustrating to work with, and general support for them in the broader ecosystem is lacking and mutually incompatible.

> those modules are probably abandoned and you shouldn't use them anyway.

Yes, that's the point, the ecosystem is now lacking because of the number of abandoned modules (even for quite common stuff).

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#63

Post by cafard »

jzer0cool wrote: post #32

Can anyone advocate here their thoughts to "must use" Perl for any scripts / projects?

I don't know about "must use", but now and then I write a short script for some kind of text processing. I've also used it fairly recently for a script pulling data out of SQL Server, mostly because I already had the DBI::Sybase module installed.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#64

Post by bachmeier »

None of this makes sense IMO. The point of Perl 7 was not to allow breaking changes. It was to send a signal that Perl was alive and that the Perl 6 messup was behind them. Then two years later they announce that there's still no Perl 7 because they're still working on Perl 5.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#65

Post by dinom »

HeckFeck wrote: post #59

I'll speak up for Perl. I learntbit voluntarily in my own spare time and actually get a lot of delight out of the language. I like that it is very unrestrictive. The sigils make sense when you wrap your mind around them and you miss them in other languages. It is excellent at parsing text. I wrote a static site builder using Perl along with a very rudimentary templating system ( https://soft.thran.uk for the curious)…

I wouldn't worry much... the reports of Perl's death have been greatly exaggerated!

The blog post seems to indicate that the steering council simply wants to to avoid being bitten by Zawinski's "CADT" model.

And who could blame them after seeing the kind of stunts pulled in other language communities?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#66

Post by api »

HeckFeck wrote: post #59

I'll speak up for Perl. I learntbit voluntarily in my own spare time and actually get a lot of delight out of the language. I like that it is very unrestrictive. The sigils make sense when you wrap your mind around them and you miss them in other languages. It is excellent at parsing text. I wrote a static site builder using Perl along with a very rudimentary templating system ( https://soft.thran.uk for the curious)…

> It is excellent at parsing text.

"Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" was one acronym I remember.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#67

Post by alfiedotwtf »

jzer0cool wrote: post #32

Can anyone advocate here their thoughts to "must use" Perl for any scripts / projects?

My MO is to start off scripts in bash, but once I get to about 3 functions in or need to do some text processing (but no need to drop down to Rust), I rewrite the script in Perl and go from there.

On the flip side, I would never get a Perl script and rewrite it in Bash.

Perl <3

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#68

Post by alfiedotwtf »

danrocks wrote: post #28
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?

Amazon's language for storefront UI templates is Perl [1]. When I joined, I couldn't help but laugh that poor developers are dragged through the hell of 5 leetcode interviews to end up working on a UI framework that is 25 years old. [1] http://www.masonhq.com/sites Edit: I left in 2013 so I don't know if it's still the case.

To be fair, HTML::Mason was probably the most powerful templating toolkit at the time (Text::Template was there too, but from memory Mason was almost everyone's goto).

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#69

Post by D13Fd »

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…

Seems like they could just lock all of the new features behind a “use x.x” line rather than going feature-by-feature. And they could include “use latest” or similar for people who don’t care about the risk and are fine just fixing things if they break.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#70

Post by MrJohz »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #35
viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, those are "real" breaking changes in that a script running in one version of the interpreter could break if it runs in a later version, without any modifications to the script itself. But in fairness, they're a very conservative definition of breaking changes - e.g. the output of the `--version` flag changing, or some Unicode characters classes changing.
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