Slashdot Mirror
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."
It must be real good if it goes to eleven.
While you're being adventurous and testing Perl 5.11.0 I also suggest trying a Perl 6 implementation. Rakudo Perl (running on the Parrot VM) is one of the most actively developed right now. Not as solid as Perl 5.X yet, but certainly getting there.
Kernel 2.6.31.1
PHP 5.2.11
Apache 2.2.13
Debian 5.0.3
Keep up with all those thrilling point released with slashdot.org
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.
no, proves instead of being dead it's stagnant. Perl 5.x lingers like scent of dead skunk under the porch while the Frankenstein of Perl 6 is still on the mad scientist's table, metaphorically getting body parts sewn on from morgues and cemeteries and hospitals across the globe. Perl 6 is the undead Creeper of programming languages
Uhm...
Perl 5 development is stagnant for one simple reason: Perl 5 is near perfect, there is nothing left to be developed there.
Some wanted better Perl with more consistent syntax. That's what Perl 6 is for. 5.10/etc are intermediate releases serving the purpose of facilitating future migration to Perl 6: some ambiguous constructs of previous version are gone in 5.10/etc.
I personally do not care much about 6th - I yet to find any pathological problem in Perl 5 which would persuade me somehow to move to next big thing. Perl 5 is well documented, has piles of modules and examples all over the net. I see no point to move from it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Its not an indication of anything. 5.11 is a development branch. In theory it should be released the moment they implement one feature that doesn't belong in 5.10.
nice to hear of universe between your ears, where it's 1999. outside of that, in real world use, Perl has plummeted in use in last five years, from third most widely used language to eleventh. the language has stagnated and any Perl creative effort being wasted on the undead Perl 6.
http://xkcd.com/224/
qw(the list of strings operator) is awesome and is equivalent to a list of strings. The main complication of Perl data types: If the thing you're assigning to, or getting out, is an array, it starts with an @: @states = ("Alabama", "Alaska", "Arizona", "Arkansas"); (or if you don't like typing ",s all day long, @states = qw(Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas). If the thing you're assigning to, or getting out, is a scalar, it starts with a $: $states[0] eq 'Alabama' or $states[0] = "Canada". If you want an array reference, the reference itself is a scalar, and the thing you're pulling out is also a scalar because that's all you can put into arrays (which is why complex data structures are arrays or hashes with references to other arrays or hashes inside). $stateref = \@states; $stateref->[0] eq 'Canada'; $other_ref = [qw(manitoba vancouver tiajuana)]; @array_again = @$stateref; @array_again = @{$other_ref}.
And that's really all there is to it, unless you want array slices or something (and who doesn't? @threestates = @states[0..3]).... or getting those out of a reference (@{$stateref}[0..3]).
Oh, and hashes work on the same principle, but with % for the hash, {} for the indexes, () for populating the hash with an even-sized list, {} for the anonymous reference, and you can do @a_codes = @state_to_postal_codes{qw(alabama alaska arizona arkanasas)}
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
and Perl use had dropped to 15% of its former level in the past five years because the perfect number of applications have been developed with it, there's almost no software left to write.
Perl probably has the best testing culture out there from the major programming languages, including Java on the list. Between TAP, Perl 5 core's large test suite and a myriad of test related modules it has automated testing well covered.
Did you know for example that when you upload something to CPAN, it gets automatically smoked on dozens of platforms and hundreds of different boxes, test reports sent to the author and assistance provided to diagnose platform specific problems if needed?
Manual testing is for the problems not caught by the huge array of automated tests.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Yeah, I'm gonna use this statistic, but only the part of it that I like.
Benchmarks and whatnot have little relevance to the real world.
It's true that thanks to the "there is more than one way to do the same thing" isn't very appealing to commercial companies. But at the same time in the past 15+ years I work, literally every employer had some part of its infrastructure supported by Perl programs.
Perl isn't for everyone. Obviously simpler languages like Java or C# or Python would tend to dominate because barrier to entry is lower. Nothing new.
Perl dominated Web in the times when it was a new thing. Internet itself was a new thing. And obviously to start something new you need smart and experienced people. Among such people Perl tend to be quite popular. Now Web design became something what even your mom can do - tools are abundant. There is no need to employ such heavy lifting tools like Perl anymore.
But thinking that Perl was used exclusively to do web stuff is a rather silly mistake to make.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Every so often when I think that Perl might be worth considering again, I come across some truly baffling example of misguided intentions like this.
I'm sure someone thought it was a brilliant idea to save keystrokes - why type "list.GetRange(0,3)" when you can create syntax using random unused symbols on your keyboard like @states[0..3]? After all, the metric we use to judge programmer productivity is the number of keystrokes they use writing code, not the maintainability of their code.
Oh yeah! And let's pick a totally random set of characters and use it to tell the code syntax parser to change modes! How brilliant! We can just use "qw" to mean "list of strings operator". Sure, why not, nobody would ever write a function called qw on their own, so there will never be a conflict. And now our code has random text in it which is hard to scan for and isn't surrounded by quotes and doesn't obey the same logic that any other text does.
Seriously, consistency helps reduce the burden on a programmer. There is no excuse for a language that attempts to remove readability and consistency for the sake of reducing the number of keystrokes required to type a task. You can only save yourself typing time once, whereas readable code saves you time every day for years.
Is that why the interface is such fucking shit?
include: Slashdot
I can't believe I have to explain this to somebody reading Slashdot, but interface is built with html and css, not perl (or any other server language).
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
What random symbols? the 0..3 type of syntax seems to be pretty common outside of Perl as well.
And Perl doesn't have a .GetRange(0,3) type syntax since it's not an OO language originally. OO was grafted on to it later, so a list in Perl is still a list, and not an object with methods.
Same logic could apply to exactly any other function. Personally I think "print" is a much more logical name for a function a programmer might want to use than "qw" (if your code has functions with names like that, I don't want to deal with it).
As a language construct though, it'd be weird if "qw" had a much longer name, since it's intended to help make things shorter. And it probably stands for "quote words" which seems pretty logical given what it does.
Also, this complaint seems odd in regards to Perl, which has a much cleaner namespace than many other languages, and helps keeping it clean.
I don't get this part?
I agree, though in part only.
Seriously, Perl gives you a choice. If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't use every single construct I can either. Sometimes they help:
Why type all those quotes and commas, which can easily be messed up, leading to a compile failure? It's even more readable this way. Sometimes things like $_ help inside things like map, sometimes they make things more confusing. A good programmer knows when a tool is appropiate.
Sometimes quick and dirty is a good thing. When I make a log parser in 15 minutes to gather some stats for a one time event, it helps being able to take some shortcuts. But those are by no means necessary, and I don't use them when writing bigger things.
Kids today... Who writes in C? Real Programmers write everything in assembly - all those fancy "volatile" and "restrict" constructs are just cruft required because they couldn't find Real Programmers who didn't need stinking optimizers. Java... don't even get me started - support for synchronization IN A LANGUAGE - that's just silly talk.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading