Perl 5.18.0 is now available

The changes:

http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/perl/pod/perldelta.pod

Perl 6 releases itself monthly for YEARS now.

http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/

http://rakudo.org/downloads/rakudo/

From the perspective of somebody who needs a production-grade Perl implementation, Rakudo doesn't cut it, I'm saddened to say.

Monthly releases are a good step in the right direction, but they aren't very useful to those of us who need something more robust.

Perl 5 currently offers this robustness, while Rakudo unfortunately does not. The other Perl 6 implementations end up being worse than Rakudo in this respect, as well.

I was a Perl lover once.

And now it seems I understand the haters.

Just don't use Perl.

The language seems fine, productive, even sublime at first but you will encounter some horrible design features.

Just read the following,

http://markmail.org/message/h2spyi5za4qheuft

-- Perl's data structure serialization is leaky. Thought you made an int ? Whoa ... serialized as a string.

http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2013/02/no-indirect-consi...

-- A language feature causing a burnout ? Well fuck me !

That's just a tip of the iceberg.

PHP, a fractal of bad design ?

Perl, a quantum bomb, waiting to tick off.

The Modern Perl movement is like saying "I'll close my eyes and crime ceases to exist."

No best practices will save you from broken language features.

The people who maintain Perl source code, are not a _fan_ of Modern Perl. They won't make "strict" the default or introduce signatures or better OOmodel.

The people who proclaim "Modern Perl" won't fork.

Even this release shows how clueless Perl maintainers are !

* They released a switch statement long long back

* And now they mark it even as "experimental" because of the leaky "my $_" scope.

Oh God ! I will never emotionally invest in another tool.

EDIT: Neutral language.

I think there should be some kind of changing of names. For a while it looked like it's another incremental step, if a big one. Which obviously requires running two implementations in parallel for a while -- similar to Python 2 and 3, or several operating systems and distros.

But right now, especially once Perl development really picked up, it might be time to "divorce" the two languages. It seems more like Algol60 vs. Algol68, or Modula-2 vs. Modula-3. Sure, there's a number in there, but it isn't just about the version of the main implementation.

Having said that, kudos to the Perl team. I really like that they now release new versions pretty regularly, which is a good sign to show people that Perl5 ist still very much alive and nobody needs to hold their breath for the time being.

If only I could use something more recent than 5.8 at work...