The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership

Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."

Comments

Perl's place in todays world?

[rockinrobotix]

Other than for products (or news aggregating websites) that were originally coded in Perl is there any reason to start a project today in Perl instead of any of the more modern scripting languages?
This is not a rhetorical question (or in Slashdot: I am not trolling). I would actually like to know why developers would choose Perl over alternatives today on a new project.

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[King Babar]

This suggests an obvious question: what's wrong with Perl? Well, there's plenty wrong with Perl that I can point out, but interestingly, I've discovered that the complaints which Perl experts have are radically different from the complaints that casual Perl users have (amusingly, many folks who criticize Perl couldn't tell simple Perl and PHP snippets apart).

What you say is true, but misses a major, major point. Perl right now has a pretty horrible reputation in some quarters, and even though it might be the result of kvetching from a lot of uninformed people, pointing this out is not a solution to the problem. More than a couple of political campaigns have gone down in flames when candidates made no useful response to baseless negative campaigning. Right now, I'm finally getting more excited by Perl6 now that there looks like there will be one, but we're still realistically looking at January 2007 for that, which is about seven years after the effort started.

Given the comment at the very end of your post about Ruby, you realize the kind of mortal peril that Perl finds itself in. If Matz had not been Japanese, and therefore more of the Ruby docs had been available in English maybe 3 years earlier, Perl could have ended up stone cold dead. What the new leadership has got to keep in mind is very simple: if we don't finish Perl6 *right now*, we're all going to die. This was not the only way to have done things, but so much has been invested in Perl6 for so long that there is really no way to make Perl5 better in ways that will convince people that it isn't last year's language. If only a bit more thought had gone into Perl5 these last five years or so, we'd be in better shape right now.

But I have one more point to make, while I'm on the soap box:

People complain about Perl's "line noise" characteristics and unmaintainable programs and ignore that much of this stems from heavy regular expression use (yell at regexes, not Perl) and people without a strong programming background finding the language easy to use (yell at those people, not at their tool).

That's not completely true. Like it or not, every Perl variable name has a piece of line noise attached to it that 90% of the time clarifies nothing. For that matter, there is the madness surrounding lexical variables in Perl. Using them is good programming practice, but every declaration of such a thing adds another "my" to the list. It would have been SO EASY to define a flag or a pragma noting that all of the declarations in a file were implicitly of "my" variables, but this never happened. And then there is the fiasco of function argument declarations. As in: Perl, unique among all other scripting languages doesn't yet have useful parameter lists in function definitions Every time I type somehing like my ($foo, bar, $baz) = @_; I think to myself "lame lame lame". Sure, Perl6 solves this one quite handily, and gives eleventy-seven different ways to call and declare function parameters, but Yeesh! Did we really have to wait for the One Great Perl to arrive to get something that sucks less than Javascript 1.0 in this respect?

I have been a Perl programmer for 14 years now, and I think the world of what it can do. But I am telling you this: if we don't fix Perl, we will die. The seven lean years will kill us unless we make it completely obvious to people how superior Perl6 is, and unless we make sure that it really is out there to hack with. If betas of Perl 6 don't arrive before the middle of 2006, I swear we are doomed. Please do everything in your power to make sure this doen't happen.

Thanks for listening. :-)