Perl 5.18.1. Yes, it's alive

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2013/08/msg205897.html

by lelf • 13 years ago

68 57 13 years ago

nntp.perl.org

What on earth was the point of the quote that introduced this release? It felt like a retread of Andreessen's famous "poorly debugged set of device drivers" line. Are we still on Slashdot? Is it 2005? Hot grits! Natalie Portman!

SimHacker6• 13 years ago

Were people still excited about Perl in 2005??!

ttflee• 13 years ago

I was excited about Perl for the first time when I learned it in about 2005. I was using perl to glue data and NCBI Blast to do some naive BioInfo pseudo research, from today's perspective.

cmccabe2• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre.

Was slashdot still relevant in 2005? Was perl? I feel like they both peaked right around the turn of the century.

berntb6• 13 years ago

This was funny.

Yesterday, cmccabe was snarky about subtle changes in versions of the Python/Ruby std libs. Today, he/she is snarky about a similar language, which really take backwards compatibility seriously. (Google darkpan/backpan for discussions.)

(But ok, he do seem to not have looked at Perl since the turn of the century.)

stiff• 13 years ago

Seems like a tradition of the Perl folks:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/ms...

The Chuck Moore quote is especially ironic given what Perl represents in the programming language design space...

Mithaldu2• 13 years ago

In short: Larry started it by quoting Lord of the Rings, later release managers rolled with it. They aren't necessarily reflective on the release or current issues, but mostly there because the release manager felt like it. For more detail: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/Porting/epigra...

ehsanu1• 13 years ago

Point or not, I actually found it interesting. Quoting part of the quote:

You’ve got gigabyte disks; you’ve got megabyte RAMs.

The book this appears in was published 2009, though the interview with Chuck Moore surely happened somewhat earlier. But yay for triple order-of-magnitude improvements!

lmm• 13 years ago

Don't forget "perl 6 is a mistake".

supercoder• 13 years ago

Even though it's not popular to say so, I really like Perl.

It's a shame it got a reputation as being uncool as it's a very capable language and nice eco system.

I also think the criticism about unreadability is way overblow, it's what you make of it really.

lelf3• 13 years ago

I feel it got a reputation of @#$@#(==~/s(.*)+) language that was updated last time in 1995. Not that it is uncapable of @@->$/=+s{}. But when you

  use Modern::Perl;
  use Moose;

it's quite different thing. Perl6 may become cool, but it's a different story.

(Moose is full-grown object system, with meta object protocol, nice syntax and implemented completely as a library).

_delirium• 13 years ago

I kind of like the non-modern parts of Perl myself, for some of the original purpose of making a superset of sed+awk+sh with better control flow constructs and better performance. I don't entirely understand why sed/awk are so popular on HN but old-style Perl isn't, since it's generally nicer and usually faster, for most things the sed/awk/sh combo would be used for.

bane6• 13 years ago

I love Perl as well, but it's definitely gotten the reputation as the really awkward nerd among nerds. I agree with lots of people that the early stages of the Perl 6 effort caused so much distraction for so long that Perl 5 languished and lost lots of momentum for the language (and language philosophy).

The Perl community, tired of waiting for a workable Perl 6 implementation, has lavished some fine attention to Perl 5 and it's in incredible shape, but the target community, also tired of waiting for Perl 6, has largely moved on.

It's going to be tough to bring people back into the fold. Everybody wanted Perl 6, and it barely works now. The features in 6 are amazing (might even be enough to get folks to come back), but the implementations are all over the place. Perl 6 needs a couple of killer apps. The CFG work might have made handling XML stupid simple, but XML is quickly falling out of relevancy.

The transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 might go down as one of the great language mismanagements in history. For goodness sake, it's been in design for almost 14 years! And there are really just now workable implementations coming out, but all are still incomplete, lack features, robustness and speed.

I'm also guilty of this, having been excited about Perl 6 a decade ago, but taking a wait and see approach that lasts to this day, until development settles down. I don't want to commit lots of work that will be made obsolete the next time Larry decides to change an operator's semantics.

Is it finally time to sit down and learn Perl 6?

colomon3• 13 years ago

As one of the Perl 6 developers, my suggestion would be to wait a couple of months. There have been some very exciting developments with the new JVM backend for Rakudo Perl 6, like new work on threads and very significant speedups on longer processes. But it's not quite yet ready for prime time -- there are definitely still some rough edges. The rate of progress on it has been phenomenal -- it essentially didn't exist at the end of March, and passes 99% of the Rakudo spec tests today. I will be very surprised if the current issues with it still exist in October.

That said, there really haven't been too many major changes to the language itself (as opposed to the implementation) in the last couple of years. I have several modules I wrote 3+ years ago, and keeping them up to date with the language has only required trivial changes in that time. You could certainly start learning the language today using the Parrot implementation with the knowledge that something better will be along very shortly.

cygx• 13 years ago

The transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 might go down as one of the great language mismanagements in history. For goodness sake, it's been in design for almost 14 years!

It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds:

Yes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005.

Guess what got started a year later (2006) and isn't finished yet as well? Rust.

Is it finally time to sit down and learn Perl 6?

Learn it? Certainly. Use it in production? Not yet. The Parrot backend was used to nail down the object system. Supposedly, the mostly-working JVM backend will be used to nail down threading semantics.

Concurrently, they are developing their own VM to get rid of the semantic mismatch between the language runtime and backend VM.

muriithi2• 13 years ago

How would the Perl 5 => Perl 6 transition compare to the Python 2 => Python 3 transition?

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

I used to work with Perl 6 years. As much as I like it, going to Ruby was such a relief and joy! I never looked back. Perl is just way too @$%{}__ for me. And some stuff, like OO really, really not only looks but also feels like a dirty hack put on top of something else.

berntb6• 13 years ago

Ah, so you left the Perl world just before Moose -- and don't even know about it? :-)

swash• 13 years ago

We're using Perl for a new startup. Our team has a background in computational biology where Perl is still big. Some of us have more than 10 years of Perl experience and if you know the language well it's just insanely productive.

Readability was never an issue. We follow a few common guidelines and with Perl::Tidy we get consistently formatted code.

So in principle Perl is perfect for us, the only drawback is that there is less and less library support for Perl. Most services like for example Stripe have libraries for Python, Ruby but don't bother with Perl (and I don't blame them). Third party libraries from CPAN are usually not that robust and well maintained.

But in general the Perl backend is the most robust part in our codebase and I would not trade it for any other language.

SimHacker6• 13 years ago

Good luck finding any decent Perl programmers to hire. And if you do find them, good luck paying their exorbitant hazard pay and keeping them happy enough to stick around. And then after they leave, good luck finding more Perl programmers to willing to clean up the unmaintainable mess they left behind.

antitrust3• 13 years ago

I agree. Perl is great and often the fastest way to git 'r done, especially across multiple operating systems.

Perl got a bad rep for two reasons. First, writers of boutique languages wanted a reason to feel good about themselves. Second, certain segments of the Perl community (I won't name names) insisted on writing obfuscated, baffling code that read like line noise from a modem.

The Perl community counteracted this, but there were still enough of these people out there to give it a bad rap.

In the meantime, if you're a Perl programmer who can write functional, efficient, clean and readable code, there's no shortage of stimulating work.

laichzeit0• 13 years ago

And those of us who know Perl will continue to use it as syntax and a couple of cute features is hardly enough impetus to throw away years and years of accumulated experience in the language and libraries to learn Python or Ruby or whatever else is the New Perl (tm). And I will continue coding in C and PHP because those are workhorses I'm equally expert at.

Newfags always gonna hate oldfags and their rusty (but trusty) old battle-hardened toolboxes.

Mithaldu2• 13 years ago

While i appreciate the start of this post, there is no need to attack others or resort to name-calling.

Flimm• 13 years ago

I'm at a Perl conference right now with hundreds of other attendees. Perl definitely is alive.

SimHacker6• 13 years ago

Are they still selling misogynistic t-shirts?

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Perl_is_my_bitch

It's so telling how Randal Schwartz, purveyor of hooters booth babes and publisher of "amihooternot", chimes in about how it's bad because it gives Perl an image of being the tool of "teen perl hacker misogynist guys," and that's harder to sell to Corporate America. Yet it doesn't even occur to him to mention that it's also bad because it's WRONG and disrespectful to women and offensive to people who aren't sexist.

The Perl community certainly has a long standing and well earned reputation of being "teen perl hacker misogynist guys," that drives away both women and Corporate America.

Perl 5.18.1. Yes, it's alive

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