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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

71–80 of 245 posts

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#71

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.

The freedom to flexibly put thoughts into code can be used to make code more readable, or less, it depends on the programmer. A significant code base in any language can turn into a hot mess

The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority. We didn't use tricky or out of the ordinary syntax unless it was absolutely necessary (like unusual regex, etc), and in those cases we would document what was happening with comments and maybe a reference to the appropriate man page. We had a style guide, for a consistent look and feel. We paid attention to naming and commented blocks of code, so the reader would not need to run an interpreter in their head while skimming through the code. We'd seek feedback from each other. It worked out well. We had no problems reading our code.

We used the flexibility and expressiveness of perl to make our code more readable. We had the freedom to tailor the code to what we were doing, instead of the other way around.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#72
post #51

If you're interested in the story behind why some languages and specs (PHP 6 and IPv5 and a few others) appear have skipped a major version number I wrote a little bit about them: https://blog.mclemon.org/missing-version-numbers

That page should have "24th December 2015" for the Perl 6 release date, because it was not skipped, it was actually released. See the Perl 6 release announcement at https://web.archive.org/web/20151225055622/https://perl6adve... and Perl 6 download page at https://web.archive.org/web/20160208204149/http://perl6.org/... (for Perl 6 release 2016.01, there were other releases later).

It only appears to have been skipped when looking from today's point of view, since many references to Perl 6 have been scrubbed from the web and replaced with its new name. But for those who were following the saga back then, starting with the announcement that the next major release of Perl would be Perl 6, followed by the many announcements of cool new features that next major release of Perl would have, culminating with its long-awaited Christmas release, it's hard to say that it never existed under that name.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#73
post #56
post #20

Ah Perl! The old friend, you can always rely on to do quick scripting work. I've written non-trivial quantities of Perl in the past, and maintained other people's Perl code too. Contrary to popular opinion, I've always found it easy to maintain. I still call upon Perl to do open(FILEHANDLE, $file) or die; while( ){ .... } close(FILEHANDLE) Sort of work. These days I do good deal of work in Python. Python itself has b…

Examples? I don't recognise anything Perlish in Python. Ruby, yes, but not Python.

I don't really see it either, but maybe a few things like collections.defaultdict (like Perl's normal associative arrays) and sysconfig (very similar to "use Config;").

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#74

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)…

XLSX or XLS?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#75
post #72
post #51

If you're interested in the story behind why some languages and specs (PHP 6 and IPv5 and a few others) appear have skipped a major version number I wrote a little bit about them: https://blog.mclemon.org/missing-version-numbers

That page should have "24th December 2015" for the Perl 6 release date, because it was not skipped, it was actually released. See the Perl 6 release announcement at https://web.archive.org/web/20151225055622/https://perl6adve... and Perl 6 download page at https://web.archive.org/web/20160208204149/http://perl6.org/... (for Perl 6 release 2016.01, there were other releases later). It only appears to have been skipped…

The OP "What happened to Perl 7" doesn't say anything about Perl 6!

I'm still confused about what happened to Perl 6! "replaced with it's new name" -- googling, that's "raku". So... what was going to be Perl 6 is considered a different language, and not particularly compatible with Perl. But "Perl 7" is meant to be less of a departure?

It is weird OP left Perl 6 out of the story of "what happened to Perl 7". I guess it's just too painful?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#76

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 worked on a site conversion of a 14 year old Perl site about a decade ago. The creator had build a database out of the file system leveraging Perl's parsing capabilities. Still one of the fastest sites I've ever touched in my career but the code was really hard to follow.

I find that the ideal place for Perl (for me) is smaller one-offs. When used for a huge site it can get really messy.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#77

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 used Perl in gradschool and it still has a special place in my heart. You're right: for reading / writing files it is excellent, and I've never seen a faster tool for those tasks either (okay, unless you want to write in C )

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#78
post #51

If you're interested in the story behind why some languages and specs (PHP 6 and IPv5 and a few others) appear have skipped a major version number I wrote a little bit about them: https://blog.mclemon.org/missing-version-numbers

You may add Winamp in that list :)

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#79
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page should have "24th December 2015" for the Perl 6 release date, because it was not skipped, it was actually released. See the Perl 6 release announcement at https://web.archive.org/web/20151225055622/https://perl6adve... and Perl 6 download page at https://web.archive.org/web/20160208204149/http://perl6.org/... (for Perl 6 release 2016.01, there were other releases later). It only appears to have been skipped…

The OP "What happened to Perl 7" doesn't say anything about Perl 6! I'm still confused about what happened to Perl 6! "replaced with it's new name" -- googling, that's "raku". So... what was going to be Perl 6 is considered a different language, and not particularly compatible with Perl. But "Perl 7" is meant to be less of a departure? It is weird OP left Perl 6 out of the story of "what happened to Perl 7". I guess…

Long ago (~year 2000), Perl 6 was announced with great fanfare. Larry Wall set out to start producing a bunch of specs ("Apocalypses", "Synopses" and "Exegeses"), while a bunch of people set out coding. Then two things went wrong.

First, the Perl 6 development had bad project management. According to the reports, the culture attracted experimentalists with interesting ideas, but didn't get along with boring people who wanted to do things like releases and steadily approaching functionality. So there were a number of projects, a number of which were abandoned. Things dragged on, and nobody was cracking the whip. It took 15 years for Perl 6 to finally announce its first official release.

Perl 6 also turned out to be too different from Perl 5. Different syntax, and no XS, which meant every Perl module interfacing with a library wouldn't work even if some sort of automatic conversion, or compatibility mode was possible. XS is tied to Perl 5's internals, and Perl 6 was an effort to make a new language from scratch, without using the old interpreter.

Meanwhile, people started abandoning Perl 5 reasoning that since Perl 6 was in development, 5 would eventually die, and the lack of compatibility would mean current efforts on 5 would be wasted.

It took a very long time but finally it was decided that Perl 6 wasn't really Perl 6, but some other, Perl-like language, and renamed to "Raku" to signal this. But by then it was already too late, most everyone had already moved on, and by the time when Perl 6 was finally released it was an extremely niche thing very few people had any interest in.

Meanwhile, Perl 5 development continued in the background, and they decided that it'd jump version from 5 to 7 to avoid confusion. Perl 7 is the direct descendant of Perl 5, with the same syntax, new features and very few deprecated things.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#80

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.

How you use or abuse that freedom is entirely your choice.
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