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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#81

Post by rprospero »

codeflo wrote: post #40
viraptor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it isn't like there was any choice on that matter There was another choice. This is what I mean: however bad you think py2->py3 was, people are using py3 now unless they've got really good reasons not to and are prepared to suffer. When it came to perl5/6, it turns out over time most people choose "neither". SUSE didn't update the link like others did so it's not really that py2 is the default, but python2 was alwa…

The “neither” choice happened with Python 2/3 as well. The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend. Long before that, before the Python 3 transition, there was a significant amount of buzz around everything from web frameworks to desktop GUI applications. The way I remember it, almost all of that attention was killed during the transition, when people tried…

> there was a significant amount of buzz around ... desktop GUI applications

As someone who is still supporting multiple desktop GUI applications in python, what did they pick instead? I'd love move off Python, but nothing else seemed to have the proper maturity.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#82

Post by cesarb »

dale_glass wrote: post #79
jrochkind1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I would like to emphasize the ordering of these events: first "Perl 6 was finally released", and only later was it "decided that Perl 6 wasn't really Perl 6 [...] and renamed to Raku to signal this". It was too late not only because most everyone had already moved on (by the reasons you mentioned: why would anyone invest in Perl 5, when the migration to Perl 6 would throw away all that investment?), but also because Perl 6 had already been released under the "Perl 6" name.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#83

Post by tialaramex »

dinom wrote: post #65
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?

CADT (the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers") is about rewrites. Jamie particularly doesn't like the habit of throwing away old bugs you didn't fix on the rationale that if they were really still a problem you should take the time to install the new program that doesn't fix them and report them again...

I don't think rewrites were on the map for Perl, except arguably for Raku (Perl 6 as was) and I don't think Raku's developers were intending to throw away bug reports and just begin over next year, indeed even though Perl 6 failed in its original goals Raku seems to still be going.

I wouldn't classify any of the spectrum of language evolution strategies for popular languages as CADT, even Python where Python 3 was needlessly incompatible this wasn't part of some larger plan it just fell out from what they wanted to do and was then mismanaged. Getting to a place where strings aren't just "some bytes, who knows if they're human text, good luck" is difficult enough to justify a lot of pain on the route there, notice how C++ has tried and failed several times already.

Jamie was thinking mostly of things like GNOME where this was (is?) a big problem.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#84

Post by 323 »

smcl wrote: 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

I remember when there were parallel Winamp 2 and Winamp 3, and the next one was Winamp 5 (which is 2+3).

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#85

Post by cutler »

reducesuffering wrote: post #55
cutler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Ruby is heading in the same direction.

Yes, the trend of usage metrics don't look promising. It's basically only used for Rails and the heyday was 2010-2016. People are much more likely to reach for Django/Python or Javascript backends, especially with the ubiquity of React. Ruby jobs are going to generally be maintenance of older projects.

See also http://www.modulecounts.com .

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#86

Post by 323 »

gjvc wrote: post #9
davorg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a London-based freelancer specialising in Perl, I can tell you that the number of companies developing new systems in Perl is tiny (like, maybe, half a dozen). Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.

what are you going to do then?

Maybe he'll wait for the Y2038 crisis :p

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#87

Post by weatherlite »

cutler wrote: post #54
davorg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a London-based freelancer specialising in Perl, I can tell you that the number of companies developing new systems in Perl is tiny (like, maybe, half a dozen). Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.

I think Ruby is heading in the same direction.

Will take awhile for Ruby to reach that state (if at all), 15 years at least I'd say. The reality is many companies are built on Ruby and rewrites are hard. Stripe, Shopify, Github, Gitlab and the list goes on. Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.

But I'm not arguing Ruby is well past it's peak - that is (sad, to me) fact because I happen to think it's a gorgeous language but it is what it is. I guess I'll have to get used to Python/Node or maybe switch to low level which is an old and perhaps unrealistic old dream of mine.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#88

Post by dale_glass »

cesarb wrote: post #82
dale_glass wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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. I agree with the rest of your comment, but I would like to emphasiz…

I agree, good clarification.

It's a pity really, lots of people worked hard on it, and I think things could have worked out better by just better messaging. Doing the "Perl 6 to Raku" renaming early on might have salvaged things.

I think this is an important lesson -- technical skills are great, but communication is extremely important.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#89

Post by runevault »

jlg23 wrote: post #80
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is true. The downside is that a couple days of not worrying about the understandability of your code can lead to a spiral that quickly gets out of control. Plus it makes expanding a dev team significantly harder since you really need people all on the same page of what readability means. Yes you can do things like coding standards, but the more free form the language the tougher such standards are.

That doesn't make a language bad, but it does change when and who can get away with using it. Same as the argument that comes up every time people talk about Lisp.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#90

Post by synu »

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 was the first language I learned, and I will always have a fondness for it. But I’m also happy to be using languages like Ruby now for scripting.
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