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What Happened to Perl 7?

blogs.perl.org

91–100 of 245 posts

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#91
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beca…

> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.

Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.

In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#92

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.

They are not working on perl 5, neither a perl 7. The biggest excitement might be the design of their new object system. But if you look at it and compare it to the design of their OO designed in 2002 (for their perl 6) it's a serious throwback. not even talking about their inability of a proper implementation.

in the meantime I've implemented that, plus types, plus proper signatures, plus unchecked arrays when safe, plus an integrated ffi plus tons more features.

their is no development, only maintainance. plus lot of internal fights. plus a CoC, which was used to eliminate the only remaining developer, because he dared to critice the stakeholders which blocked progress, and still continue to make the codebase worse.

the less the work, the more the fights.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#93
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…

OP is on blogs hosted on the official Perl domain so it probably assumes some knowledge regarding Perl.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#95
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

Fun list!

GNOME jump from 3.x to 40 could be added: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/gnome-40-version-number-...

Or Microsoft Edge from from 44 to 79: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#96

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.

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 happen…

> 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

If one learned how to collaborate on projects which, I think, the perl language does not incentivise.

(edit)

> The perl coding team I was on made readability our #1 priority.

I'd love to read more about that. Have you by chance documented your experience somewhere?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#97
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features. Probably not much of a problem currently, but might be if releases get more frequent. But to use that new feature they'd need to modify their code anyway, so this isn't really an issue in practice, is it? > I personally like the “edition” concept of Rust a lot be…

> How is this any different from having a repeat of the python2->python3 fiasco Perl already had python2->python 3000 fiasco before python: PERL6

Perl6 was really a different fiasco.

Perl had the could be bytes, could be characters fiasco in 5.8, but they didn't include a bunch of other difficult changes at the same time. 5.8 could be a bit rough around unicode, but 5.10 was pretty solid as I recall, and you can always use bytes; in a scope where you need bytes.

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#98
post #84
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).

That was because nobody wants to download a Winamp 4 skin

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#99
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beca…

> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it. Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl. In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from thi…

I am only aware of Booking.com that is to this day mostly Perl. Do u know of any specific names?

Re: What Happened to Perl 7?

#100
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like today's standard pick is Electron.
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