Perl 5.11.0 Released

jamie points out that Perl 5.11.0 was released yesterday, as well as a schedule for future 5.11.x releases, planned for the 20th of every month. Jesse Vincent encouraged testing of the new (development) version, saying, "If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior releases wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development release which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code."

Comments

Perl has died in industry.

[Anonymous Coward]

For software of any appreciable size, Perl has unfortunately died in industry. People just aren't using it for anything more than 10-line throwaway scripts.

Perl 6 was something those of us in industry had been anticipating with glee. We expected it to modernize the Perl platform, and make it a contender against Java, .NET and C++ for large-scale software development. But we also expected we'd have that around 2005. It's nearly 2010, and we still don't see much real progress on that front. Rakudo just isn't a production-grade product yet.

I'm sad to admit it, but instead of waiting for incremental Perl 5 releases for the next decade until Perl 6 is finally mature enough, the company I'm with has started to migrate from Perl to Python. Unlike the Perl community, the Python community has shown with Python 3 that they're capable of working together to create a major release with many new features in a relatively short amount of time (especially compared to the Perl 6 effort).

Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code into Python has actually gone reasonably well. Although I was a staunch defender of Perl, I do have to give Python its kudos. Every day it looks more and more like we've made the right choice moving away from Perl, and towards Python.

Re:Perl has died in industry.

[Fnord]

Ok, I actually do use perl professionally, but even I realize there are some serious problems with it. The reality is a middle ground between you and the grandparent.

But we also expected we'd have that around 2005.

You were expecting it the same year the very first implementation (Pugs) was started? That was silly of you.

Pugs was started in 2005 as an attempt to inject life into what looked like a dying project. The language spec started in 2000. In five years they hadn't nailed it down. In ten years there still isn't a working implementation.

It's nearly 2010, and we still don't see much real progress on that front. Rakudo just isn't a production-grade product yet.

Unless lives are at risk, Rakudo is stable enough for production (although you may want to wait for the April "Rakudo Star" release).

That is EXTREMELY wishful thinking. It may have changed in the last couple months, but I tried this perl 6 code out earlier in the summer:

my $blah = "blah";
$blah = $blah.reverse;
print $blah;

and that SIMPLE code resulted in an infinite recursion error.

I'm sad to admit it, but instead of waiting for incremental Perl 5 releases for the next decade until Perl 6 is finally mature enough

Perl 6 != Perl 5. They are two VERY different languages. Perl 5 and 6 will continue to be maintained in parallel.

Perl 5 has problems inherent with the language that inhibit large scale use, and this is coming from someone who works on a multi-million line perl 5 project. Recent frameworks have tried to address the problems by grafting perl6 like features onto perl5, but they always impact performance, and are never perfect. And goddammit, I've still found no way around the broken behavior of the SUPER keyword.

until Perl 6 is finally mature enough, the company I'm with has started to migrate from Perl to Python.

You're complaining about maturity and yet you're using Python?

Unlike the Perl community, the Python community has shown with Python 3 that they're capable of working together to create a major release with many new features in a relatively short amount of time (especially compared to the Perl 6 effort).

Perl 6 has many, many more changes than Python 3. It is an entire rewrite of the language from the ground up, they didn't just change the print statement to a function and call it a day.

Rewriting our approximately 3 million lines of Perl code into Python has actually gone reasonably well.

That would have been what, 6 million lines in Python? Now I know you're trolling.

You're being a bit unfair to Python. I'm not a huge fan of the language (if I had to move anywhere it'd be ruby), but python 3 while it didn't change much in the language itself, was a huge boost in performance to the interpreter. There are incremental changes happening to the perl5 interpreter, but nothing major structural can, because the codebase just isn't very maintainable. In fact that was one of the main reasons they decided to scrap it and develop parrot from scratch instead of working from the perl5 base. Try embedding the python interpreter and the perl5 interpreter in a C program, see which one has internals that make more sense.

Not to mention that python is immensely more parsable. There are identical python interpreters in C, on the JVM, and on the CLR. Its been said that the only thing that can parse perl5 is perl5, and that is evidenced by the fact that the parrot project gave up on implementing a perl5 parser.

That's not to say there aren't things python does wrong. Every time there's a point release it seems everyone's code completely breaks, while perl5 is backward compatible to perl1. And frankly, I hate significant whitespace, but that's a personal preference.

Regardess things are not completely happy in the perl world.