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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

#71

Post by gmmeyer »

hinkley wrote: post #35
politelemon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes... We have some high revenue, important contract type systems written a long time ago and maintained by the same subject matter experts who simply move the codebases (old and new) to newer systems and stacks. As you can tell, the SMEs have no interest in learning other things and so any new initiatives that require them to implement it is subject to their preferences.

Many places don’t support antifragility. Having an old system that nobody wants to rewrite may not be a reflection on the engineers. You’re an expert, and a rewrite is going to expose you to a lot of scrutiny. You are going to break things, when maybe you haven’t broken things in a long time and people like it that way. So when some day arrives where a new fad is hot and it’s hard to impossible to find Perl programme…

There's no need to rewrite a system that works and that you're not gonna change. While programming languages go out of fashion there will always be people who are capable of writing them. The median age of a cobol programmer has not changed in 20 years because more people keep learning the language.

Demand in this case, will likely create its own supply.

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

#72

Post by CountSessine »

hinkley wrote: post #35
politelemon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes... We have some high revenue, important contract type systems written a long time ago and maintained by the same subject matter experts who simply move the codebases (old and new) to newer systems and stacks. As you can tell, the SMEs have no interest in learning other things and so any new initiatives that require them to implement it is subject to their preferences.

Many places don’t support antifragility. Having an old system that nobody wants to rewrite may not be a reflection on the engineers. You’re an expert, and a rewrite is going to expose you to a lot of scrutiny. You are going to break things, when maybe you haven’t broken things in a long time and people like it that way. So when some day arrives where a new fad is hot and it’s hard to impossible to find Perl programme…

the will create a new team to rewrite it badly because now they have no other choice

Given Perl’s legendary code-opacity and maintenance challenges, this kind of seems inevitable. After all, if you could at least read and decipher the old code, maybe you could reproduce it!

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

#73

Post by cutler »

Floegipoky wrote: post #66
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.

String parsing - Perl5's forte - is still dog slow with Perl6/Raku and year after year we hear that will change in the future. Don't hold your breath.

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

#74

Post by cutler »

r00fus wrote: post #25

tl;dr - Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. Perl was great 20 years ago for basic scripts. Where is it still used today who hasn't transitioned to Python/etc?

Most of Perl's virtues were inherited by Ruby, not Python. Hell, Python doesn't even have a regex operator.

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

#75

Post by megaframe »

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.

Yes, I manage a set of tools and libraries written in perl that are pretty large and service the whole company. That said we're re-writing them all to Python so more people can contribute... Saddens me a little I like Perl, but I'll get over it.

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

#77

Post by cutler »

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.

Ruby also has this.

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

#78

Post by ww520 »

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.

Yes. You’ll be surprised. Some of the biggest tech companies still use Perl in their critical components in production, and some of the initiatives are in recent years.

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

#79

Post by austincheney »

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.

The primary use case of Perl is systems automation. Personally I prefer Node.js but most Linux distributions come with a Perl interpreter already installed and not Node. If you are working in an enterprise environment and for security reasons are not allowed to install software, which is common, you can still perform automation with Perl scripts.

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

#80

Post by peterwwillis »

This is possibly a stupid comment, but I'd love a modern language whose expected lifetime is 100 years. A language whose specification details how it can be run for 100 years on changing hardware + operating systems, and is built with the least amount of, and easiest to perform, maintenance in mind.

Those languages kind of exist, but not expressly written as such. C will outlive us all.

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